PEECHES AND ESSAYS 



Prof. JOHN WILSON, Rev. Dr. WALLACE, 

Gen. JAS. A. GARFIELD, Hon. S. S. COX, 

Hon. W. P. FRYE, Hon. J. PROCTOR KNOTT, 

Mr. ANDREW CARNEGIE, 

Lord ROSEBERY, Hon. E. R. HOAR, 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 

Hon. GEO. F. HOAR, U. S. Senate, W. R. SMITH, 

Hon. DAVID B. HENDERSON, Speaker, House 

of Representatives, 

Dr. MacLEOD, 

WITH 

Poems on Burns, 

feY 

MONTGOMERY, HALLECK and CAMPBELL, 
Mrs. WM. R. SMITH, and others. 



2d Edition— Enlarged. Published under the auspices 
of the Jean Armour Burns Club. 



GIBSON BROTHERS, PRINTERS, 
1902. 




JEAN ARMOUR, 

ROBERT BURNS' WIFE. 



SPEECHES AND ESSAYS 



Prof. JOHN WILSON, Kev. Dr. WALLACE, 

Gen. JAS. A. GARFIELD, Hon. S. S. COX, 

Hon. W. P. FRYE, Hon. J. PROCTOR KNOTT, 

Mr. ANDREW CARNEGIE, 

Lord ROSEBERY. Hon. E. R. HOAR, 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 

Hon. GEO. F. HOAR, U. S. Senate, W. R. SMITH, 

Hon. DAVID B. HENDERSON, Speaker, House 

of Representatives, 

Dr. MacLEOD, 



Poems on Burns 



MONTGOMERY, HALLECK and CAMPBELL, 
Mrs. WM. R. SMITH, and others. 



2d Edition— Enlarged. Published under the auspices 
of the Jean Armour Burns Club. 



GIBSON BROTHERS, PRINTERS, 
1902. 






This booklet is published for the purpose of helping people to 
think aright about Robert Burn;. 



At a meeting of the Burns Club of Washington, April 10, 1876, a 
committee was directed to publish in book form, as a contribution to Burns 
literature, the speech of John Wilson, delivered to 70,000 people congregated 
on the banks of the Doon, on the return of Burns' son from India, in 1844, 
which had never been published in this country ; the great oration of Dr. 
Wallace, delivered in Edinburgh, on Burns' birth-day, 1872 ; together with 
the speeches delivered and letters read before the Club on various anniversary 
occasions by the following distinguished statesmen and orators : Gen. Jas. A. 
Garfield, Hon. J. G. Blaine, Prof. James Monroe, Hon. S. S. Cox, Hon. 
W. P. Frye, Hon. J. Proctor Knott, and others. 

In this Second Edition we add the essay of Mr. Andrew Carnegie, the 
speeches of Lord Rosebery, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hon. George F. Hoar, 
Wm. R. Smith, Hon. David B. Henderson, and Dr. MacLeod, and letter of 
Hon. E. R. Hoar, and sundry interesting poems. 

The names of the above well-known orators, statesmen, and essayists are a 
sufficient guarantee that the contents of this little volume will make an excellent 
addenda to every edition of the poet's works. 

The keen analysis of J. Proctor Knott, the natural eloquence of W. P. 
Frye, the witticisms of S. S. Cox, the scholarly parallels of Jas. A. Garfield, 
and the remarks of other distinguished gentlemen who have spoken for Burns 
at the National Capital, are worthy of America. The progressive religious 
thought in the oration of the Rev. Dr. Wallace is inimitable in ils way, and 
well worthy a place in connection with the masterly speech of glorious old 
Christopher North. § 

As a prelude we give the poem of James Montgomery : 
ROBERT BURNS. 



What bird in beauty, flight, or song, 
Can with the bard compare, 

Who sang as sweet, and soar'd as 
strong 
As ever child of air? 

His plume, his note, his form, could 
Burns 

For whim or pleasure change : 
He was not one, but all by turns, 

With transmigration strange. 

The Blackbird, oracle of spring, 
When flower'd his moral lay ; 

The Swallow, wheeling on the wing, 
Capriciously at play. 

The Humming-bird, from bloom to 
bloom, 

Inhaling heavenly balm ; 
The Raven, in the tempest's gloom ; 

The Halcyon in the calm. 

In " auld Kirk Alloway," the Owl, 
At witching time of night ; 

By " bonnie Doon," the earliest Fowl 
That carroll'd to the light. 

He was the Wren amidst the grove, 
When in his homely vein ; 



At Bannockburn the Bird of Jove, 
With thunder in his train. 



The Woodlark, in his mournful hours ; 

The Goldfinch, in his mirth ; 
The Thrush, a spendthrift of his 
power, 

Enrapturing heaven and earth. 

The Swan, in majesty and grace, 

Contemplative and still ; 
But roused, — no Falcon, in the chase, 

Could like his satire kill. 

The Linnet in simplicity, 

In tenderness the Dove; 
But more than all besides was he, 

The Nightingale in love. 

Oh ! had he never stooped to shame, 

Nor lent a charm to vice, 
How had devotion loved to name 

That Bird of Paradise ! 

Peace to the dead ! — In Scotia's choir 
Of Minstrels great and small, 

He sprang from his spontaneous fire, 
The Phoenix of them all. 



tree 

k. tit, it 



c 



Speeches on jjurns 



A grand demonstration in honor of the genius of 
Robert Burns was suggested to the people of Scot- 
land by the arrival from India of Col. William Burns, 
the poet's second son. August 6, 1844, was selected 
as a national holiday in Scotland. The great festival 
was presided over by the Earl of Eglinton, supported 
by hundreds of the nobility and men of letters, whose 
names filled columns of the public journals of that time. 
We select from the able speeches made on the occasion 
that of Prof. John Wilson, of Blackwood 's Magazine : 

Were this festival to commemorate the genius of Burns, 
and it were asked what need is there of such commemoration, 
since his fame is co-extensive with the literature of our land, 
and inherent in every soul, I would answer that though ad- 
miration of the poet be indeed unbounded as the world, yet 
we, as compatriots to whom it is more especially dear, rejoice to 
see that universal sentiment concentrated in the voice of a 
great assembly of his own people — that we rejoice to meet in 
thousands to honor him who has delighted each single one of 
us all at his own hearth. But this commemoration expresses, 
too, if not a profounder, yet a more tender sentiment ; for it 
is to welcome his sons to the land which their father illus- 
trated — to indulge our national pride in a great name, while, 
at the same time, we gratify in full breasts the most pious of 
affections. It was customary, you know, in former times, to 
crown great poets. No such oblation honored our bard ; yet 
he, too, tasted of human applause — he enjoyed its delights, 
and he knew the trials that attend it. Which, think you, 
would he have preferred ? Such a celebration as this in his 
lifetime, or fifty years after his death ? I cannot doubt that 
he would have preferred the posthumous, because the finer 
incense. The honor and its object are thus seen in their just 
proportions ; for death gives an elevation which the caudid 
soul of the poet would have considered, and that honor he 
would have reserved rather for his manes than encountered it 

3 



with his living infirmities. A.nd yet, could he have foreseen 
the day when they for whom his soul was often sorely troubled, 
should, after many years of separation, return to the cot where 
himself was born, and near it, within the shadow of his own 
monument, be welcomed for his sake by the lords and ladies 
of the land — and dearer still, far dearer to his manly breast, by 
the children and the children's children of people of his own 
degree, whose hearts he sought to thrill by the voice of his 
own inspirations — then surely would such a vision have been 
sweeter to his soul even than that immortal one in which the 
genius of the land bound holly round his forehead — the lyric- 
wreathed crown that shall flourish forever. Of his three sons 
now sitting here, one only, I believe, can remember his father's 
face— can remember those large, lustrous eyes of his, so full 
of meaning, whether darkened by thought, melting in melan- 
choly, or kindling in mirth— but never turned on his children, 
nor the mother of his children, but with one expression of 
tenderest, most intense affection. Even at this day, he, too, 
may remember his father's head with its dark clusters, not 
unmixed with gray, and those eyes closed forever, lying upon 
the bed of death ; nor, should such solemn image arise, would 
it be unsuitable to this festival; for while I bid welcome to 
the sons of Burns to their father's land, I feel, I cannot but 
feel, that while you have conferred upon me a high honor, 
you have also imposed upon me a sacred duty ; and however 
inadequately I may discharge it, at least I shall in no degree 
violate either the spirit of humanity or truth. In speaking of 
the character of Burns, in the presence of his sons, I must 
speak reverently ; but even in their presence I must not refuse 
to speak the truth. I must speak according to the established 
and everlasting judgment of what is right. Burns had his 
faults. Burns, like every other mortal being, had his faults, 
great faults in the eyes of men, and grievous in the eyes of 
heaven above. There is a moral in every man's life, even in 
his humblest condition, imperfectly understood; and how 
affecting is it when we read confessions wrung out by remorse 
from the souls of the greatly gifted and the gloriously en- 
dowed. But it is not his faults that are remembered here — 
surely it is not to honor these that here we meet together. To 
deny that error is error is to extenuate its blame. We make 
an outrage upon sacred truth ; but to forget that it exists, or if 
that may not be wholly, so to think of it as to regard it with 
that melancholy emotion that accompanies all our medita- 
tions on the mixed character of men, that is not only allow- 
able, but it is ordered — it is a privilege dear to humanity. 
And well indeed might we tremble for him who should in 
this be dead to the voice of Nature crying from the tomb. 
And in this mark how graciously time aids the inclinations of 
charity. Its shadows soften what they may not hide ; and the 
distant discords that might have grated too painfully on our 



ears are now undistinguisbably lost in that music, sweet and 
solemn, that comes afar with the sound of a great man's name. 
It is consolatory to see how the faults of those whom the peo- 
ple honor grow fainter and more faint in the national memory, 
while their virtues grow brighter and still more bright ; and if 
in this injustice has been done them — and who shall dare to 
deny that crudest injustice was once done to Burns— the suc- 
ceeding generations become more and more charitable to the 
dead, and desire to repair the wrong by some profounder hom- 
age. It may be truly said " the good which men do lives after 
them." All that is ethereal in their being alone seems to sur- 
vive ; and, therefore, all our cherished memories of our best 
men, and Burns was among our best, ought to be invested with 
all consistent excellencies ; for far better do their virtues in- 
struct us by the love which they inspire than ever could their 
vices admonish us. To dwell on the goodness of the great 
shows that we ourselves are not only lovers of nature, but that 
we may be aspiring to reach his serene abode ; but to dwell 
upon the faults of greatness, and, still worse, to ransack, in 
order that we may create them, that is the low industry of 
envy, which grown into a habit, becomes malice, at once hard- 
ening and embittering to the mind. Such, in the case of our 
great poet, beyond all doubt was the source of many a malig- 
nant truth and lie, fondly written down, carefully recorded, by 
a class of calumniators that never may become extinct. And for 
many years we were forced to hear souls ignoble, formed to be 
forgot, dragging forth some puny phantasm of their own 
heated fancy, as if it were the majestic shade of Burns, evoked 
from his mausoleum for contumely and insult. We have thus 
been told, by some who rather presumptuously assume the 
office of our instructors, to beware how we allow our admira- 
tion of genius to seduce us from reverence of truth. We have 
been told how far moral is superior to intellectual worth ; nay, 
that in nature they are not allied. But akin in nature they are, 
and grief and pity 'tis that they should ever be disunited. But 
mark in what a hateful, because hypocritical, spirit such coun- 
sels as these have often been preferred, till salutary truths 
have been perverted by gross misrepresentation into pernicious 
falsehoods. They did not seek to elevate nature ; they sought 
to degrade genius. And never in any instance did such men 
stand forth so glaringly self-contradicted of wretched igno- 
rance of the nature of both than by this wilful perversion of 
many of the noblest attributes of humanity in the character of 
Robert Burns. Yes ; virtue and genius are both alike from 
heaven, and both alike tend heavenward. Therefore we 
lament to see a single stain assailing the divine gift of genius — 
therefore lament to see virtue, where no genius is, fall before 
the tempter. But let us never listen to those who, by the very 
breath of morning, would seek to blight the wreath bound 



6 

round the forehead of the Muse's son by a people's gratitude. 
Let us beware of those who, under affected zeal for religion, 
have as often violated the spirit of both by gross misrepresen- 
tations and exaggerations and denunciations of tbe common 
frailties of our nature in illustrious men — in men who, in spite 
of their aberrations, more or less deplorable, from the right 
line of duty, were, nevertheless, like Burns, in their prevailing 
moods, devoted worshippers of virtue iu the general tenor of 
their lives, and noble examples to all of their brethren. Burns, 
who, while sorely oppressed in his own generous breast by 
the worst of anxieties — the anxiety of providing the means 
of subsistence to those of his own household and his own 
heart— was notwithstanding no less faithful to that sacred gift 
with which by heaven he had been endowed. Obedient to the 
holy inspiration, he ever sought it purely in the paths of pov- 
erty — to love which is indeed from heaven. From his inexhaus- 
tible fancy, warmed by the sunshine of his heart, even in the 
thickest gloom, he strewed along the weary ways of the world 
flowers so beautiful that even to eyes that weep— that are 
familiar with tears— they look as if they were flowers dropped 
from heaven. But in a more humane — in a more Christian — 
spirit, have men now consented to judge of the character of 
their great benefactor ; therefore at an hazard I may call 
them sacred scenes, the anniversary of the birth or death of 
one who had completed so great an achievement. But they 
have still sought to make manifest the honor they intended 
him — to make manifest, if possible, in some degree the de- 
mands made upon them by the imagination aud the heart. 
In what other way than that could genius ever have dared 
to seek to perpetuate in elegies and hymns expressive of a 
whole people's triumph, and a whole people's grief, for the 
death of some king, sage, priest, or poet? What king from 
the infirmities of his meanest subjects ever was free? We 
know that throbs come from a kingly heart up to the brow 
which is rounded by a kingly crown. Aye, kings have pas- 
sions or ideas as fatal as those that torment the heart of 
the meanest kind on his pallet of straw. But then the 
king, with all his sins, had been a guardian, a restorer, a de- 
liverer ; thus his sins were buried with his body, and all over 
the land — not only in his day, but in after generations— the 
cry was " O king, live forever ! " The sage has seen how 
liberty rests on law; how rights are obligations; how the 
passions of men must be controlled in order that they may be 
free. He, too, how often has he struggled in vain with his 
own passions ; with the powers of evil that beset him in that 
seclusion in which reverend admiration would fondly believe 
that wisdom forever serenely dwells ? The servant of God, 
has he always kept his heart pure from the earth, nor ever 
lifted up in prayer but spotless hajids ? The humbled confes- 
sion of his own unworthiness would be his reply, alike to the 



scoffer and to him that believed. But were there one afflicted 
by plague or pestilence, he had carried comfort into the house 
deserted by all, except by sin and despair — or he sailed away 
from the homes of Christian men, where he had lived long in 
peace, honor, and affluence, for the sake of his divine Master, 
and for the sake of them who were sitting in darkness and the 
shadow of death ; therefore shall his name be blessed, and all 
Christendom point to him as a chosen servant of God. Now, 
it might seem that there is a deep descent from these bene- 
factors of our race to those who have done other services to 
mankind by their powers of fancy and imagination, and by , 
means of the created powers of God. It might so seem ; but 
they, too, have been numbered among our best benefactors. 
Their graves have been visited by many a pious pilgrim from 
afar ; and whether we think on the highest of them all, Milton, 
who sung things yet unattempted in prose or rhyme, and yet 
who was not free from the errors inseparable from the storms 
of civil war which then raged, even to the shedding of the 
blood of kings — down to England's beloved illustrious min- 
strel — Wordsworth — descending from height to height in the 
regions of song — we find that our love and gratitude is due to 
them as benefactors of our species. And among such bene- 
factors who will deny that Burns is entitled to a place — who 
reconciled poverty to its lot, who lightened the burden of care, 
made toil charmed with its very task-work, and at the same 
time almost reconciled grief to the grave; who by one im- 
mortal song has sanctified forever the poor man's cot, and by 
a picture which genius alone, inspired by piety, could have 
conceived, a picture so tender and yet so true of that happy 
night, that it seems to pass, by some sweet transition, from 
the working world into that hallowed day of God's appoint- 
ment and made to breathe a heavenly calm— a holy serenity ? 
Now, I hold that such sentiments as these which I have ex- 
pressed, if they be true, afford a justification at once of the 
character of Burns — his moral and intellectual character — that 
places him beyond the possibility of detraction, among the 
highest order of human beings who have benefited their race 
by the expressions of noble sentiment and glorious thoughts. 
I fear I am trespassing on your time too much, but I would 
fain keep your attention for a very short time longer, while I 
say that there is a voice heard above and below and round 
about — the voice of mere admiration, as it has been expressed 
by men of taste and criticism. There is a voice which those who 
listen to it can hear — a voice which has pronounced its judg- 
ment on the character of Burns — a judgment which cannot on 
earth be carried to a higher tribunal, and which never will be 
reversed. It was heard of old, and struck terror into the 
hearts of tyrants, who quaked and quailed and fled for fear 
from this land before the unconquered Caledonian spear. It 
is a voice they were pleased to hear ; it was like the sound of 



8 

distant waterfalls, the murmurs of the summer woods, or the 
voice of the mighty sea which ever rolls even on. I mean the 
voice of the people of Scotland, of her peasantry and trades, 
of all who earn their bread by the sweat of their brow ; the 
voice of the working men. I shall not pretend to draw their 
character ; this I may say of them now, and boldly, that they 
do not choose to be dictated to as to the choice of those who 
with them shall be a household word. They are men from 
whose hands easier would it be to wrench the weapon than 
ever to wrench their worship from their hearts. They are men 
who loved truth, sincerity, integrity, resolution, and inde- 
pendence — an open front, and a bold eye, that fears not to 
look on the face of clay. They do not demand, in one and 
the same person, inconsistent virtues ; they are no lovers of 
perfection or of perfectibility ; they know that there are 
fainter and darker shadows in the character of every man ; and 
they seem, as we look back on their history, to have loved 
most those who have been subject most within and without to 
strong and severe temptation. Whether in triumph or in 
valor, they have shown at least, by the complexion of charac- 
ter of their souls, that they loved their country, and had no 
other passion so strong as the defence of the people. Aye ! 
they too, unless I am mistaken, loved those who had struggled 
with adversity. They loved those who have had their trials, 
their griefs, their sorrows; and, most of all, they loved those 
who were not ashamed of confessing that they were so, and 
who threw themselves on the common feelings and forgiveness 
here below, and trusted for forgiveness on other principles 
and feelings altogether to that source from which alone it can 
come'. The love of the people of Scotland for those whom 
they have loved has not been exclusive— it has been compre- 
hensive. They left the appearance of their different charac- 
ters, and honored them for every advance they made, provided 
they saw the strength of character, moral and intellectual. 
Such a people as this, possessing such feelings, could not but 
look upon Robert Burns, and while they admired him they 
also loved him with the truest affection, as well for the virtues 
as for the sorrows and the griefs of that great, but in some 
respects unfortunate, man. Was he worthy of their love ? 
Taking it for granted, and we are entitled to do so — then why 
did they love him ? They loved him because he loved his own 
order, nor ever desired, for a single hour, to quit it. They 
loved him because he loved the very humblest condition of 
humanity so much, that by his connection he saw more truly 
and became more distinctly acquainted with what was truly 
good, and imbued with a spirit of love in the soul of a man. 
They loved him for that which he had sometimes been most 
at surdly questioned for— his independence. They loved him 
for bringing sunshine into dark places; not for representing 
the poor hard-working man as an object of pity — but for show- 



9 

ing that there was something more than is dreamed of in the 
world's philosophy among the tillers of the soil and the hum- 
blest children of the land. From such a character as that 
which 1 have truly given Scotland's people, one would expect 
that all their poetry would be of a stern or furious kind, the 
poetry only of bloodshed and destruction; but it was not so, 
nor is it so, but with some glorious exceptions in the poetry of 
Burns. For how did the men of old love poetry, and was it 
loved in the huts where they were born ? Yes. Poetry was 
the produce both of the heathery mountains and the broomy 
braes. In the days of old they had their music plaintive and 
dirge- like, as it sighed for the absent or wailed for the dead. 
These fragments, while they were fluttering about in disorder 
and decay, were seized upon by him, the sweetest lyrist of 
them all, and sometimes, by the change of a single word, he let 
in the soul of beauty — sometimes by a few happy touches of 
his genius he changed the fragment into a whole so exquisitely 
moulded that no one could tell which were the lines belonging 
to Burns and which to the poet of ancient days. But all of 
them now belong to Burns, for he has rescued them from ob- 
livion. He also took the music, and set the unlettered lan- 
guage of nature to every necessary modulation of human 
speech, so that the poetry of Burns is as popular and as na- 
tional as his music. 



Kobert Burns, son of the poet, in reply, said : 

I am sure the sons of Burns feel all that they ought on an 
occasion so gratifying, on which so nobly generous a welcome 
has been given them to the banks of Doon. Wherever they 
have gone they have found a reception prepared for them by 
the genius and fame of their father, and under the providence 
of God, they owe to the admirers of his genius all that they 
have, and what competencies they now enjoy. We have no 
claim to attention individually ; we are all aware that genius* 
and more particularly poetic genius, is not hereditary — and in 
this case the mantle of Elijah has not descended upon Elisha. 
The sons of Burns have grateful hearts, and will remember, 
so long as they live, the honor which has this day been con- 
ferred upon them by the noble and the illustrious of our own 
land, and many generous and kind spirits from other lands — 
some from the far West, a country composed of the great and 
the free, and altogether a kindred people. We beg to return 
our most heartfelt thanks to this numerous and highly respect- 
able company for the honor which has been done us this day. 



10 

At the Birthday Celebration in Edinburgh, January 
25, 1872, Dr. Wallace spoke "To the memory of 
Burns," as follows : 

Some people think that a demonstration like the present, to 
commemorate the work done by Robert Burns, not only for 
Scotland, but for mankind, is a proceeding that ought not to 
take place, and that cannot be defended. We are charged 
with practising the idolatry of genius. That, I believe, is the 
usual phrase. I am not sure that I exactly understand its 
meaning. In its literal interpretation it is nonsensical. Idol- 
atry means religious adoration presented in a certain supersti- 
tious form ; and it need scarcely be said that the better one 
understands and sympathizes with the ideas and spirit of 
Burns, the less will he be inclined to regard any creature, 
human or otherwise, with sentiments of that description. Ac- 
cordingly, I presume, that this idolatry of genius must be a 
figurative mode of denoting the admiration of intellectual 
power, apart from its moral character, in spite of disastrous 
influences exerted by it on the happiness or highest well-being 
of mankind. That the genius of Burns was splendid enough 
to excite this undiscriminating admiration in minds incapable 
of discrimination is not to be doubted ; but had he really pro- 
faned his great and sacred gifts, and made himself a power for 
evil, I trust that none of us would have been here to do honor 
to his memory. But if his genius was a beneficent as well as a 
brilliant force in history, then it was a force upon so great a 
scale, of so exquisite a quality, and dealing so searchingly with 
subjects of the deepest human interest, that the good it 
wrought, necessarily corresponding in its magnitude, must 
evoke some expression of grateful admiration from all whose 
sensibilities qualify them for its proper recognition. It is the 
fact that the genius of Burns dealt fearlessly with the most 
awful questions of human destiny ; investigated with original 
inquiry the meaning and the true aim and method of life; 
tasted every experience of mirthful, sad, and tender emotion ; 
and gave out its impressions and conclusions in a wealth of 
thought, a beauty of form, and a memorableness of phrase that 
have proved an irresistible charm ; and if, as I most certainly 
believe, this charm was on the side of good, I am not going to 
be such a stock or stone, or such a worse than senseless thing, 
as to make no sign of appreciation ; and I will not submit to 
the insult of being called an idolater, a worshipper of mere 
power, because in the customary symbols of rejoicing I seek to 
signify my gratitude for almost the greatest blessing the human 
race can receive from its Maker — a great poet who is faithful 
to his vocation, a master-spirit who has known how to give 
truth and sympathy a universal and enduring hold over the 
hearts of men by interweaving them with the graces of immor- 
tal song. We thank heaven, and rightly, for our very meat and 
drink— are we to be dumb over a gift like Burns? 



11 

Let rne take up that aspect of the subject which a person of 
my profession naturally regards with most interest and in 
vvhich he feels most at home — the religious and moral influence 
of Burns. Was that a good, as it was inevitably a powerful in- 
fluence ? No man should be here who has doubts upon this 
point, for if Burns was a power for evil in religion and moral- 
ity, nothing else that he said or did could atone for this dam- 
ning offence. But he needs no apology. With all respect to 
various religious persons who think otherwise, I affirm my 
conviction that the literary influence of Burns on the spirit of 
religion is as valuable as it is great. Like every great poet, 
Burns was a preacher, and in his highest inspirations spoke to 
the soul. He was not a conventional preacher certainly. He 
laid about him in a style that would not have commended him 
to many Presbyteries of the Bounds. Old women of all kinds, 
and people of that common and coarse zeal which is color-blind 
to wit, humor, and the idea of art, naturally regard his uncere- 
monious handling of their favorites as utter profanity. But 
to those who are able to place themselves at his point of view, 
and really understand him, a spirit of lofty, if often severe and 
indignant, religiousness breathes through the collective poetry 
whose publication he himself sanctioned, and which alone can 
be fairly taken as representing his true mind. He has pon- 
dered deeply the mystery of life and of death ; he has recog- 
nized a presiding order in the world, which he identifies with 
a living love ; he has persuaded himself that justice and judg- 
ment are the habitation of His throne ; in the faith of this he 
accepts his lot without complaint, congratulates himself on 
its compensations, awaits with confidence the coming of a better 
day, if not here, then in that sphere of immortal being to the 
hope of which he unswervingly clings, and consoles himself 
amidst the uninstructed or hasty condemnation of society by 
an appeal to the impartial judgment of Omniscience ; he ac- 
knowledges the imperativeness of duty; and while refusing 
most properly to humble himself in matters of error before 
other men, without taking their respective natures and circum- 
stances into account, yet before the eye of the ^ternal Holiness 
he admits his own responsibility for his own evil with penitent 
humility — 

" Where with intention I have erred, 
No oth« r plea I have 
But Thou art good : and goodness still 
Del ; ghteth to forgive." 

There are three species of fools that receive no encourage- 
ment, but much reproof, from the genuine and characteristic 
teaching of Burns— the fool that hath said in his heart there is 
no God, the fool that makes a mock at sin, and the fool that 
refuses to say " Thy will be done." These are really the great 
practical questions of all religion, and the man is either uupar- 



12 

donably unjust, or unnoticeably stupid, who will insinuate that 
these questions are treated by Burns otherwise than with the 
reverence that befits their import, and with an intensity of 
feeling and aptness of language that will outlive far-off genera- 
tions of professional preachers. Surely it is no small contri- 
bution to the influence of religion to have engraved on the 
hearts of a whole people such words as these : 

"The great Creator to revere 

Must sure become the creature, 
Bat still the preachiug cant forbear, 

And e'en the rigid feature; 
Yet i.e'er with wits profane to range, 

Be complaisance extended ; 
An Atheist-laugh's a poor exchange 

For Deity offended. 
When ranting round in pleasure's ring 

Religion may be blinded ; 
Or if she gi'e a random sting, 

It may be little minded ; 
Bnt when on life we're tempest-driven, 

A conscience but a canker, 
A correspondence fix'd wi' heaven 

Is sure a noble anchor." 

Or to have given currency to such a philosophy of life as this : 

" Then let us che-rfu' acquiesce, 
Nor make our scanty pleasures less 

By piuing at our state ; 
And even should misfortunes come, 
I here wha sit ha'e met wi' some, 

An's thanfefu' for them yet ; 
They gi'e the wit o' age to youth, 

They let. us ken oursel', 
They make us see the naked truth, 
Th^i real guid and ill. 
Tho' losses and crosses be lessons right severe, 
There's wit there ye'll get there ye'll find nae other where.'' 

Or to have popularized such an example of the true method of 
fighting with our own evil as this: 

" Fain would I say ' Forgive my foul offence,' 

Fain promise never more to disobey : 
But, should my Author health again dispense, 

Again I might desert fair Virtue's way— 
Again in Folly's path might go astray — 

Again exalt the brute and sink the man. 
Then how should I for Heavenly mercy pray, 

Who act so counter Heavenly mercy's plan ? 
Who sin so oft have mourned, yet to temptation ran ? 

O Thou, Great Governor of all below, 
If I may dare a lifted eye to Thee, 

Thy nod can make the tempest cease to blow, 
Or still the tumult of the raging sea ; 

With that controlling power assist even me 
Those headlonp furious passions to confine— 

For all unfit I feel my powers to be 
To rule their torrent in th' allowed line— 

0, aid me with thy help, Omnipotence Divine.'' 

The man who drives from his sympathy and love a nature 
from whose inmost being such utterances come stamped with 



13 

the impress of living sincerity, and who says to him, " Stand 
by! for I am holier than thou," has learned his Christianity in 
a school where I, for one, desire to take no lessons. 

But it is said Burns was unsound; his creed was very scanty. 
Certainly his creed did not contain anything like thirty-nine 
articles, and I cannot say that what he had was orthodox ac- 
cording to the standard of Westminster. He was a latitudina- 
rian ; he was a heretic ; he had no particular reverence for the 
artificialities of ecclesiasticism. But surely the day is past for 
measuring the influence of men upon the religious spirit of 
their time by the particular side which they espouse in the 
many-angled duel of polemical divinity. We are accustomed 
now to believe that a good man will do good, whatever the- 
ology he work with ; that we may take in influences of piety 
even from the devoutness of heathenism, and receive stimulus 
in duty from contemplating 

. . . "The moral works 
Of black Gentoos and pagan Turks." 

We regard simply with amusement the remarkable person 
who looks upon all the world as the eoemies of God, excepting 
himself and the members of his own little persuasion. But in 
Burns' day this idea had to be done battle for. Burns had to 
fight with people who maintained that a man's orthodoxy, or 
the reverse, formed an essential element in his salvation or per- 
dition. He certainly never scrupled to maintain the contrary. 
He declares continually that the judgment to be passed on any 
individual before God and man turns not upon his opinions, 
but his character ; not upon his faith, but his faithfulness ; not 
upon the Tightness or wrongness of his metaphysics, but upon 
the goodness or badness of his spirit. That we are able, in 
this country, to affirm and act upon this idea without much 
fear of aunoyance, we owe, in no small degree, to the clear- 
sightedness of Burns' intellect, the healthiness of his moral in- 
stincts, and the courage with which he asserted his conviction, 
amidst a community in which the necessary connection be- 
tween soundness and safety was more rigidly insisted on than 
anywhere else in Protestant Christendom. 

In the light of this idea, we are entitled to put out of ac- 
count Burns' special theological opinions in estimating his in- 
fluence upon the national religiousness in its vital character. 
He had the same right to his own dogmatic scheme that is pos- 
sessed by any other polemical writer. The question is. How 
did he urge it ? Was he painstaking or superficial ? Was he 
frivolous or serious ? Was he honest or sophistical ? Can any 
man who has read Burns intelligently hesitate about the 
answer? His theology, such as it is, is his own. It is not a 
parrot's lesson, committed to memory and believed, or at- 
tempted to be believed, on simple authority. It is the fruit of 
his own intensest mental toil exercising itself in a hunger and 



14 

thirst after truth and reality on such materials as lay within 
his reach. I wish I could believe that those who condemn 
him have thought for themselves with a tithe of his earnestness 
on the great problems of religion. Then look at the zeal, the 
fervor, the fury of sincerity with which he advocates his views. 
You cannot say, here is a mere shallow trifler, a heartless 
scoffer. No ! You may dislike what he says, but you must 
see that with all his heart he believes it, and that his fierce 
warmth and energy spring from his couviction that it would be 
well for you if you believed it, too. Consider also the entire 
and uucalculating honesty with which he spoke his mind. 
Well was he entitled to denounce with an unsurpassed— I had 
almost said unsurpassable — vehemence of withering sarcasm 
the wretched vices of cant and hypocrisy — not only the wicked 
cant and hypocrisy which is used by its selfish practiser as an 
instrument for oppressing others, but also the weak jet well- 
meaning cant and hypocrisj- which is employed merely for the 
sake of peace or self-defence. Burns was patient of neither. 
He abhorred the one as base and essentially diabolical, and he 
scourged it as near to death as it will go ; he despised the other 
as unmanly, and rebuked it as opposed to the progress and best 
interests of man. And he qualified himself for this office by 
being himself utterly open aud frank with the world. No one 
can say to him, " Physician, heal thyself.'' He has said some- 
where : 

"Ay free affhan' your story tell 

When wi' a bosom crony ; 
But still keep something to yoursel' 

Ye scarcely tell tae ony." 

The rule is a good one for private life; but for the prophet, 
the teacher of mankind, concealment of his thoughts is treach- 
ery to society. And in his public relations Burns did not 
4 ' still keep something to himsel '." If ever a great human soul 
was freely and fully unveiled for the delight or the instruction 
of the world it was the soul of Burns. 

And will any man tell me that such a way of handling the 
topics of religion is not supremely wholesome — nay, supremely 
necessary ? Have we not enough of spiritual sneaking and sub- 
mission to authority? enough of simpering or stupid indiffer- 
ence to the whole subject? enough of sham earnestness and 
unctuous make-believe, of deliberately selfish, or weakly pru- 
dential pretense ? Are we not the better of a visitation by a 
spirit of power like that of Burns, self-reliant and original, pas- 
sionately earnest, severely, nay relentlessly, veracious? The 
blast may be keen, but it kills the germs of corruption ; the 
draught may be bitter, but the end of it is health. I am well 
aware that to claim the author of the "Holy Fair," "The 
Ordination," the *' Address of the Unco Guid," the " Dedica- 
tion to Gavin Hamilton," and " Holy Willie's Prayer " (though 
Burns never gave that to the world) as exercising a salutary 



15 

influence upon religion, seems to many people paradoxical, if 
not profane. And so it would be if religion were simply a 
thing for childish men and the weaker order of women. lean 
quite understand that they should be scandalized beyond meas- 
ure by Burns. But religion is for mature and strong natures 
as well as for the juvenile and the feeble. It is long since it 
was known that there must be milk for babes and strong meat 
for men. It is right not to offend the little ones unnecessarily, 
but we cannot let the weak brother have everything his own 
way. In private it may be demanded by kindness to avoid 
chafing his tender skin, but the public teacher must not keep 
him exclusively in view, but set forth principles in their ful- 
ness, and use freely any weapons of argument or ridicule, or 
whatever else can enforce his meaning, since men must be pro- 
vided for as well as children. And whoever affects a manly 
religiousness will be none the worse, but greatly the better, for 
the study of Burns, provided he understands the province of 
art. That proviso, however, is essential. For there are many 
natures with a good deal of manliness in tbem, that are woven 
of so coarse a fibre on the aesthetic side of them that they are 
incapable of apprehending the prerogatives and utilities of art. 
The business of art is to represent both the real and the 
ideal ; both nature as it is and nature as it might be conceived 
to be. But it passes no judgment upon the moral rectitude or 
otherwise of what it paints; that belongs to another depart- 
ment. A few years ago an excellent nobleman used to impor- 
tune the House of Lords to provide skirts and trousers for the 
naked statues in the National Gallery. That good man had no 
conception of the function of art. He thought that sculpture 
was preaching indecency, while it was only representing na- 
ture. These are the sort of people who cry " O, fy !" at many 
of the stronger things in Burns. They think he is exhorting, 
where he is only painting. "Holy Willie's Prayer" may be 
shocking ; but why ? because Holy Willie himself is shocking. 
If the mirror gives an ugly reflection of an ugly face, it is sim- 
ply to the credit of the mirror, whatever it may be to the face. 
Tnis same idea of art, if they could only understand it, would 
put many foolish people right upon the subject of Burns' ama- 
tory and bacchanalian effusions. The poet really does not rec- 
ommend unchastity and drunkenness ; not even free love or 
free drinking. But the human spirit wants and needs an oc- 
casional escape from the restraints of conventional rules. Con- 
ventional law is, much of it, a necessary evil. We submit to 
it because we see that it is for the common good. But it is 
not always the idea of life which we would sketch for our- 
selves, and it is the function of poetic art to furnish a dream- 
land to which we may occasionally betake ourselves when 
weary with the jog-trot of every-day life, and enjoy in fancy 
what we deny ourselves in faet. Such ideal Bohemianisms are 
very harmless ; they tell neither upon purse, nor health, nor 



16 

morals. Nay, even those coarser productions which Burns 
himself never published (he kept back, out of regard for the 
sensitive, even such pure and powerful works of art as the 
4 'Jolly Beggars" and "Holy Willie's Prayer,") but which, 
without his consent, and contrary to his desire, were given to 
the world by the relic hunters, who rifled the dead man's pock- 
ets and ransacked his writing-desks, who interviewed the Paul 
Prys that peeped through his key-hole, and the Dogberrys 
that watched his door of nights to see if he kept elders' hours — 
even these are not fairly judged without reference to the idea 
of art. A great artist with a passion for his art may be 
tempted to make figures of beauty out of dirt, if there be no 
better material near, even though he should soil his fin- 
gers in the making ; but in criticising him, it should always be a 
question whether it is the dirt that he delights in or his own 
deftness in handling it. This I will say, that, taking Burns' 
writings all in all, and most certainly taking the writings 
whose publication he himself sanctioned, there breathes 
through them a purity of spirit and a healthiness of tone that 
are in edifying contrast to the insinuating sensualisms of many 
of our modern poets and novelists whose praise is in all the 
booksellers. 

I have dwelt so long upon the point on which I thought I 
might speak to most purpose that I can say but a sentence on 
the subordinate aspects of Burns' moral influence, and must 
pass over altogether the consideration of his works as a contri- 
bution to the emotional happiness and the intellectual wealth 
of nations. What noble or manly virtue fails to find recogni- 
tion and support in his pages ? Is it the first virtue of all, in- 
dependence, resolution to rely on one's self, or suffer ? — 
" Though much indebted to your goodness, I do not approach 
you, my lords and gentlemen, in the usual style of dedication, 
to thank you for past favors ; that path is so hackneyed by 
prostituted learning that honest rusticity is ashamed of it. 
Nor do I present this address with the venal soul of a servile 
author, looking for the continuation of those favors : I was 
bred to the plough, and am independent." Happy the people 
whose spirits are nurtured on sentiments like these, and who 
nerve themselves for the struggle of life by recollecting that 
" A man's a man for a' that." Is it an unworldly preference 
of mind to money ? 

11 O Thou who gies us each guid gift, 
Gie me o' wit and sense a lift, 
Then turn me, if Thou please, adrift 

Through Scotland wide ; 
Wi' cits nor lairds I wadna shift, 
In a' their pride." 

Is it sympathy with everything that feels ? Where can it be 
better learnt than from intercourse with that catholic affection 
which touched at the one pole the simple piety of the " Cot- 



17 

ter's Saturday Night," and at the other the uproarious freedom 
of the "Jolly Beggars ;" which gave us the mingled humor and 
pathos of " Mailie's Elegy ;" which saddened at the terror of 
the wildfowl of Lock Turit, and linked the despair of the des- 
olate field-mouse with its own ? Is it the beauty of domestic 
-affection and duty? Who teaches so often and so well that — 

" To make a happy fireside clime, 
To weans and wife, 
That's the true pathos and sublime 
Of human life." 

Is it the whole circle of the patriotic sentiments ? Turn to 
" Scots wha hae," and end where you please and when you 
can. Is it faithfulness to the tender memories of bygone years ? 
Go to the exquisite plaintiveness of " Highland Mary," or to 
the broken-hearted trance of ''Mary in Heaven." Is it the 
crowning grace of self-command ? Hear it chronicled in the 
writer's own heart's blood : 

" The poor inhabitant below, 

Was quick to learn and wise to know, 
And keenly felt the friendly glow 

And softer flame ; 
But thoughtless follies laid him low, 
And stained his name. 

** Header, attend, whether thy soul 
Soars fancy's flights beyond the pole, 
Or darhliDg grubs this earthly hole 

In low pursuit — 
Know, prudent cautious self-control 

Is wisdom's root." 

With the life of Burns we are not specially concerned here. 
It is not so much the ploughboy of Doonside, the flax-spinner 
of Irvine, the farmer of Ellisland, or the gauger of Dumfries, 
as the poet of Scotland and of humanity whom we commem- 
orate, and for whom we make ourselves responsible. But 
though it is the poet we honor and thauk Heaven for, we are 
not ashamed of the man. Others may drive Burns from their 
bosom ; I dare not. He had the temptations that beset brilliant 
genius— temptations from which his detractors are mostly free. 
He had the temptations of a position in life most tryingly in 
contrast with his lofty gifts His career has been explored by 
literary detectives and gossipmongers with a diligence that 
would have unearthed unedifying revelations in the history of 
the greatest saint in the calendar, and which is virtually equiv- 
alent to the extraction of secrets by the thumbscrews and the 
rack. Yet through it all I recognize a nature noble, manly, 
tender, striving towards the ideal good. No stain of meanness 
or dishonor rests upon his name. He owed no man anything. 
The greatest man of his country, and aware that he was so, he 
dug drains and gauged barrels, and did not grumble. He 
fought in secret with passions stronger than any of us can 



18 

know, and bewailed his evil in agonies of penitence which we 
would need bis capacity of feeling to understand ; and he died 
at thirty-seven, before the battle of the spirit was done. Let 
the faultless put him from them. Perhaps it is right ; but they 
must put me from them too. A sinful, struggling man myself, 
I cannot abandon my great and gifted and sorrowing brother 
in his grief. " Restore such an one in a spirit of meekness, 
considering thyself lest thou also be tempted," is a sacred law 
which I dare not and wish not to disobey. Grateful to Heaven 
for his work, proud of his name, mingling our sympathy with 
the recollection of his sorrows, we recall to mind to-night the 
asserter of truth, the smiter of dishonesty, the teacher of wis- 
dom, the psalmist of human brotherhood, the preacher of every 
manly virtue, the revealer of human character, the master at 
once of pathos and of wit, the sweet singer of the tender feel- 
ings, the pcet of our country, yet the possession of mankind, 
Robert Burns. 



WASHINGTON— FESTIVAL OF 1874. 

Mr. W. K. Smith introduced the subject-matter of 
the festival in a few remarks. He said : 

Ladies and Gentlemen : It is my agreeable duty, as presi- 
dent of the Burns Club of Washington, to bid you a hearty 
welcome. We thank you, one and all, for uniting with us to 
honor the name, and, if it be possible, to increase the fame of 
him— 

lk "Who sang of Scotia's loves and joys 

As poet's ne'er had sung, 
And woke a strain which echoes down 

The ages ever more 
American forest and Australian plain 
Swell the impassioned notes from shore to shore. 
Immortal Burns ! deep in the inmost core 
Of Scotia's heart, thy image lies enshrined ; 
'Midst tears and smiles, beloved more and more, 
The poet and the priest of human kind. 
What needs thy name the aid of puny art ? 
It lives eternal in the human heart. 

What wealth of glory Scotia owes to thee, 
Immortal Burns ! 
Her noblest one! 

In the far west thy star hesperian glows ; 
In the far east it shines another sun. 
Bend low, my boys, before this simple shrine ! 
Bend low to Burns, to poesy divine !" 

These lines, fresh from Auld Scotland, I found as a contri- 
bution from Dunbar to the poet's corner of a rural paper, pub- 
lished in Haddington. They indicate clearly the true posi- 
tion of the poet, and may be taken as proof of the truth of 
Thomas Carlyle's prophecy that time would but increase the 
fame of Burns. His article in the Edinburgh Renew, 1828, con- 






19 

taining this prophecy, together with John Wilson's great essay 
-on the genins of the poet, did much to teach the people to think 
aright about Burns. 

Another glorious exposition of the poet, and a truly Christian 
examination of the character of the man, was made by the 
Rev. Dr. Wallace, just two years ago, in a speech at the birth- 
day celebration in Edinburgh. This gentleman's intellectual 
strength seems worthy of his famous name. 

His speech, together with Carlyle's letter about Burns' Clubs 
generally being aimless things, with a very little of Burns and 
a great deal of self in them, induced us, as a club, to examine 
ourselves, and to make an effort to elevate and give a higher 
aim to our association. The Burns Club as now established is 
for the purpose of gathering together the various editions of 
Burns' works — biographies, illustrations, eulogies, portraits, 
in short, everything that cau in any way illustrate the land, the 
literature, and character of Burns — to have regular meetings 
whereat his poems may be read, his songs sung, addresses 
delivered, criticisms read, and to make an earnest effort to 
honor his memory by a celebration of his birthday : thus to 
keep in remembrance our undying admiration of the noble 
qualities which distinguished him while living. 

Ladies and gentlemen, with your kind co-operation we can 
make the Burns Club of Washington worthy of the man and 
the place ; worthy of the author of that grand Declaration of 
Independence — 

"A mau ; s a man for a' that.'' 

Worthy of the home of that political idea — 

" The rank is but the guinea's stamp, 
The man's the gowd for a' that." 

Ladies and gentlemen, words canuot utter the gladness of 
my own heart, and I speak also for those congenial co-operat- 
ing spirits who have worked and struggled together to secure 
this magnificent meeting in honor of our darling poet. 

We are proud to have with us those whom the nation de- 
light eth to honor with her highest positions, to speak for the 
immortal author of — 

"Scots wha ha'e wi' Wallace bled." 

Again let me thank you in the name of the Club for your 
presence. 

The president then read the following note from the 
Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Hon. 
James G. Blaine : 



20 

Fifteenth Steeet, 29th January, 1874, 

Thursday Evening. 
To the President of the Burns Club : 

A hoarseness which has been coming on me through the day 
deprives me of the pleasure I had anticipated of proposing a 
toast to the memory of Burns, and adding a word of introduc- 
tion to my friend, Gen. Garfield. My task, however, would be 
superfluous, even if I could be present, for the General needs 
neither introduction nor commendation to the Burns Club. 
He will speak to you in a manner that will make you thank me 
for considerately staying away and not delaying his eloquent 
words. 

The Scotch are always proud of their birth and their blood : 
and this pride, I venture to testify, will bear transplanting, and 
can be inherited in its full strength at least down to the fifth 
generation. Wherever you find one who traces even a remote 
relationship to "Auld Scotia," you will find a hearty admirer 
of Burns. But genius is not confined to lands or latitudes. 
It belongs to the whole world ; and to-night on three conti- 
nents and the far-off isles of the Southern Sea the memory of 
the great poet will be celebrated with admiration, enthusiasm, 
and affection. 

In haste, sincerely yours, 

J. G. BLAINE. 

Gen. James A. Gakfield, on coming forward to 
respond to the toast " The day we celebrate," was 
greeted with warm applause. He said: 

I have no doubt that the kind reference to me by the Honor- 
able Speaker, in the letter which has just been read, springs 
from his remembrance of the fact that a few years ago he and 
I enjoyed the great pleasure of visiting the land of Burns, and 
making the tour of the Scottish lakes in company. And who 
that has once seen it can forget such a land, or wonder that its 
rugged and noble beauties should have added inspiration to 
the genius of its poets ? Who can forget the excursion along 
the banks of the Doon, where every turn of the road and river 
has been immortalized by the ride of " glorious" Tarn? 

I take this occasion, Mr. Chairman, to thank you and the 
Burns Club of Washington for the pleasant opportunity which 
you have afforded me to turn aside for a moment from the 
exacting duties of public life and from its sharp conflicts, to 
enjoy this festival, and to unite in doing honor to the memory 
and genius of the foremost song-writer of the world. 

It is usual to praise Burns chiefly because of the great con- 
trast between the splendor of his work and the humbleness of 
his origin. But genius needs no apologies on that score ; and 
I do not hesitate to challenge the comparison between his 



f 



21 

works and those of any other poets who have wrought in the 
same field. 

In the highest class of lyric poetry three names stand emi- 
nent. Their field covers eighteen centuries of time, and the 
three men are Horace, Beranger, and Burns. It is an interest 
ing and suggestive fact that each of these sprang from the 
humble walks of life. Each may be described as one 

"Who begs a brother of the earth 
To give him leave to toil," 

and each proved, by his life and achievements, that, however 
hard the lot of poverty, " a man's a man for a' that." 

Permit me to glance a moment at the characteristics of each. 
Horace, the son of a freedman, was born among the wild scenes 
and simple virtues of the Sabine country. His opportunities 
for education were greater than either of the other two with 
whom I am comparing him. But he began his career as a 
treasury clerk, living on a pittance that scantily furnished him 
with "bread and lentils;" and yet. in that humble position, 
he laid the foundation of a fame whose glory shines down 
across the ages with lustre ever brightening as the centuries 
advance. 

The Roman language was the severe language of law, of 
war, of stately oratory ; but it was songless, until Horace came 
and attuned its measures to the melody of the lyre. He had 
a right to boast that he was " the first to wed Italian measures 
to iEolian song." It may have been thought boastful in him, 
when, in the last ode of the third book, he ventured to predict 
that his verses would be remembered as long as the high 
priest of Apollo and the silent vestal virgin should climb the 
steps of the Capitol. But his prophecy has been more than 
fulfilled. Fifteen centuries ago the sacred fires of Vesta went 
out, never to be rekindled. For a thousand years Apollo has 
had no shrine, no priest, no worshipper on the earth. The 
steps of the Capitol, and the temples that crowned it, live only 
in dreams. But the songs of Horace are read and admired in 
all nations, wherever learning and culture are cherished. His 
pages glow to-day with all the brightness and beauty that de- 
lighted the social life of Italy eighteen hundred years ago. 

Beranger, the second in the group, was a child of poverty, 
born in an obscure corner of France. Catching the spirit of 
liberty inspired by the French revolution, he crowned the rude 
dialect of Normandy with the glory of immortal song. He 
not only ennobled his native tongue, but fired the heart of 
France with an enthusiasm and fervor which only a born poet 
can create. 

Who will deny that Burns is not only worthy to stand in this 
group, but that in many respects his glory outshines that of 
the Roman and the Norman ? Born in a country whose natu- 
ral beauty is in strange contrast with the sterility of its soil, 



22 

his early life was passed in the extremest poverty. Doomed 
to the hard slavery of mechanical toil ; receiving not more 
than seven pounds sterling for the labor of a whole year, yet, 
out of this narrow and oppressive life, which ended at the 
early age of thirty-eight, he poured forth melodies so sweet 
and so perfect that they echo and re-echo to-day in all lan- 
guages and in all hearts as the voice of Great Nature singing 
to her children. If Horace attuned the stately language of 
Rome to the lyre, Burns lifted up into immortal song, and 
saved from perishing, the dialect of his native land. If Horace 
" raised his mortals to the skies." we may say, with truth, that 
Burns "drew the angels down." 

Taine, the great French critic, admits that Burns is greater 
than Beranger ; and time alone can test the relative greatness 
of Burns and Horace. Burns was indeed the prophetic voice 
of the new age— the age born of the French revolution. Rising 
above the trammels of birth and poverty, he spoke for the 
great voiceless class of laboring men throughout the world, 
while kings and countries listened in wonder and amazement. 

A great writer has said that it took the age forty years to 
catch Barns, so far was he in advance of the thoughts of his 
time. But we ought not to be surprised at the power he ex- 
hibited. We are apt to be misled when we seek to find the 
cause of greatness in the schools and universities alone. There 
is no necessary conflict between nature and art. In the highest 
and best sense, art is as natural as nature. We do not wonder 
at the perfect beauty of the rose, although we may not under- 
stand the mysteries by which its delicate petals are fashioned 
and fed out of the grosser elements of the earth. We do not 
wonder at the perfection of the rose, because God is the artist. 
When He fashioned the germ of the rose tree, He made possi- 
ble the beauties of its flower. The earth and air and sunshine 
conspired to unfold and adorn it ; to tint and crown it with 
peerless beauty. When the Divine Artist would produce a 
poem, He plants the germ of it in a human soul, and out of 
that soul the poem spriugs and grows as from the rose tree the 
rose. 

Burns was a child of nature. He lived close to her beating 
heart ; and all the rich and deep sympathies of life grew and 
blossomed iu his own. The beauties of earth, air, and sky 
filled and transfigured him : 

" He did but sing because he must, 
And piped but as the linnets sing." 

With the light of his genius he glorified " the banks and 
braes" of his own land ; and, speaking for the universal human 
heart, has set its sweetest thoughts to music — 

" Whose echoes roll from soul to soul, 
And grow forever and forever." 






23 



WASHINGTON— FESTIVAL OF 1875. 

Mr. W. R. Smith opened the proceedings of the 
evening as follows : 

Ladies and Gentlemen : As President of the Burns Club I 
bid you welcome, and thank you for uniting with us to do 
honor to one of the most gifted beings that ever adorned and 
delighted our race. One hundred and sixteen years ago 
Hobert Burns was born. 

" Upon a stormy, winter night, 
Scotland's bright star first rose in sight, 
Beaming upon as wild a sky 
As ever to prophetic eye 
Proclaimed that Nature had on hand 
Some work to glorify the land — 
Within a lonely cot of clay 
That night her great creation lay. 

41 Coila— the nymph that round his brow 
Twined the red-berried holly bough— 
Her swift-winged heralds sent abroad, 
To summon to that bleak abode, 
All who on genius still attend 
For good or evil to the end. 
They came obedient to her call— 
The immortal infant knew them all. 

" Sorrow and Poverty — sad pair — 
Came shivering through the wintry air : 
Hope and Pity and Love were there. 

" Wit with a harum-scarum grace, 
Who smiled at Laughter's dimpled face. 
Labor, who came with sturdy tread, 
By high-souled Independence led. 
Care, who sat noiseless on the floor, 
While Wealth stood up outside the door. 

" Then Coila raised her hollied brow 
And said: ' Who will this child endow ? ' 
Said Love, ' I'll teach him all my lore, 
As it was never taught before : ' 
Said Pity, ' It shall be my part 
To gift him with a gentle heart. ' 
Said Independence, stout and strong, 
' I'll make it to wage w r ar with wrong.' 
Said Wit, ' He shall have mirth and laughter, 
Though all the ills of life come after.' 

41 Warbling her native wood notes wild. 
Fancy but stooped and kissed the child, 
While through her locks of golden hair 
Hope looked down with a smile on Care. 

44 Said Labor, ' I will give him bread ; ' 
4 And I a stone when he is dead,' 
Said Wealth, while Shame hung down her head. 



24 

" ' He'll need no monument,' said Fame ; 

1 I'll give him an immortal name ; 

When obelisks in rniu fall, 

Proud shall it stand above them all ; 

The daisy on the mountain side 

Shall ever spivad it far and wide ; 

Even the roadside thistle-down 

Shall blow abroad his high renown.' 
" Said Time, ' That name while I remain 

Shall still increasing houor gain, 

'Till the sun sinks to rise no more. 

And my last sand falls on the shore 

Of that still, dark, and unsailed sea, 

Which opens on Eternity.' " 

These words by Thomas Miller but speak in prophetic rhap- 
sody of what will be the fate of the name we are met to honor 
to-night. The ovation to Burns on his centennial birthday was 
the greatest honor ever paid to a poet. When in 1844 his 
son returned from India 70,000 persons honored him for his 
father's sake by a festival on the banks of " bonnie Doon." 
Christopher North then said: ''Burns is among the highest 
•order of human beings who have benefited their race by the 
expression of noble sentiments and glorious thoughts.' 1 This 
estimate is not overdrawn. " Has he not elevated honest rus- 
ticity, lightened the burden of care, aided to reconcile poverty 
to its lot, advanced the dignity of labor, placed a crown on the 
head of an honest man ' though e'er so poor,' and proclaimed 
him ' King o' men for a' that ? ' " 

The president then read the following letter from 
the Hon. Win. P. Feye: 

Washington, January 1C, 1875. 
W. R. Smith, Esq., 

President of the Burns Cluh ; 

My Dear Sir : I accepted, with pleasure and with pride, your kind 
invitation to address the Burns Club at their annual meeting, but unexpect- 
edly iind that I cannot fulfill the engagement, it having been determined by 
the coiumittee, of which I am a member, to go to Louisiana at once. To sim- 
ply say that I regret this is a cold expression of my feelings, for I should 
delight to speak, from a full heart, of Scotland, of Wallace, of Bruce, and of 
Bams, who has made for them all a glorious immortality. 

And yet our mission south, it seems to me. would have been regarded by 
your great poet a sacred duty. Since that sweetest songster that ever sang 
warbled the magical words, " A man's a man for a' that," a great struggle 
has been waged throughout the world, sometimes silently, sometimes ter- 
ribly, to prove the fidelity of Burns to truth in that utterance. Our own 
country has been the theatre of one of the fiercest conflicts, the issue of 
which is not even yet made certain. May the end show— 
" The honest man, though e'er sae poor, 
Is king o' men for a' that." 

May Heaven bless old Scotland, her mountains and valleys, her Doon and 
her Clyde, her Yarrow and her Tweed. l * Long may her hardy sons of rustic 
toil be blessed with health and peace and sweet content." We bless thy 
memory, too, Robert Burns, who so loved old Scotia, her men and women, 
even her mice and daisies. " her silly sheep" and "courie cattle," aye, who 
loved all things both great and small, and couldn't hate even "auld Mckie- 
ben." 

Respectfully, WM. P. FRYE. 




ROBERT BURNS. 
From an etching hy Nicholson after Nasmyth, /8/p. 



J 



25 

The Hon. James Monroe, of Ohio, was then intro- 
duced, and made a felicitous and scholarly address, in 
which he compared the various British poets, placing 
Burns as next to Shakespeare in his power of touching 
the universal heart. There were no Milton clubs, no 
Byron clubs, not even a Tennyson club ; while Burns 
clubs existed all over the world, wherever the English 
language was spoken, and they would continue to exist 
for all time. 

The president of the Club, in introducing Hon. S. S. 
Cox, said : 

Ladies and Gentlemen : I have now the pleasure to intro- 
duce to you the American biographer of his ' ' Satanic Majesty in 
Literature;" as a " Buckeye Abroad" in search of "Winter 
Sunbeams" he no doubt made some further acquaintance with 
his majesty, and can perhaps enlighten us on the doings of 
Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie. Our poet treated Satan 
kindly and was " wae to think upon yon place, e'en for his 
sake;" so does his American biographer. 

Hon. S. S. Cox was received with hearty applause, 
and spoke as follows : 

Your president introduces me somewhat vaguely as one of 
the biographers of Satan, I had supposed my humble article 
was long since forgotten. It is said in Scripture that the devil 
and all his works shall perish. I wonder that all the works on 
the devil himself have not perished. But really, he is not so 
black after all. He has many winning ways. He is as much 
entitled to a biographer as a witch to a cat. I can see that my 
friend, the president, takes a family and national pride in him. 
When the article referred to was printed it was for the Knick- 
erbocker Magazine, and intended to glorify " Old Nick" in lit- 
erature. How I omitted Burns' " Auld Hornie " or "Clootie " 
I can scarcely tell. I was quite young then ; had not mixed 
much in society or politics; had not come to Congress; and, 
therefore, my knowledge of deviltry was limited. The longer 
I live the more I see of it — and perhaps the more we live the 
more we tolerate the evil genius. 

Indeed, the Scotch devil, as organized by the genius of 
Burns, is a eulogy to his better qualities. It seems at lirst 
blush to be suggested by Milton's apostrophe to the Prince, 
who led the embattled Seraphim against Heaven ; but his is a 
better Satan than the warrior of Milton. He takes no delight 
in the squealing sinner. Old " Clootie " has a nice send-off 
for his noted name. Burns makes him rage, to be sure, like a 
roaring lion, " tirling the kirks." He reproduces the wildness 



26 

of the " lonely glen" and ruined castle amidst the windy win- 
ter nights. He calls on the warlocks and hags of the kirk- 
yards, the water kelpies of the ford, and the spunkies of the 
moss as his associates, until he brings his Satan nunc pro tunc 
into Paradise incog, to give the infant world a " shog," and 
then makes him play practical jokes on Job, until he fairly 
boiled to pardon him by the benevolent universalism of the 
last verse — 

11 I'm wae to think upon yon den — 
E'en for your sake." 

which, out of the patois, means — I don't want a hell, even to 
put the devil in. 

But this remarkable good-natured devil of Burns has some 
peculiarities of character and conduct which reminded one of 
the comic devil of the sacred drama of the Middle Ages. He 
is not the devil represented in ancient or modern times. He 
is more Kobert Burns than Robert Le Diable. He has as little 
•of the Assyrian devil as of the Prometheus of iEschylus. But 
is he not comprehended in the universal genius of Goethe ? 
Mephistopheles takes any shape. He is the standing Diabolos 
of the Greek, the adversary of Job, the serpent of Eden, the 
dragon of the Revelation, and always jolly. I am not sure but 
that the infinite variety of the article which Washington and 
its lobbies furnish was anticipated by Goethe, if not by Burns. 
Where did not Mephistopheles lurk ? Where do we not find 
that spirit of evil ? Not the old theological animal, with horn 
and hoof, such as the excommunicated from Kirk were pos- 
sessed of, and such as old wives tell of ; but the sly devil, 
which dances in the eye of beauty, gambols in the polka and 
german, and on the faro table ; puts on the claw-hammer of 
the courtier and the frock of the preacher ; pores over the mis- 
sals of the scholar and the "ayes and noes " of Congress. He 
is to be found in the imperial palace or the poorest hovel. You 
may see this universal spirit in the bourses of speculation, and 
he conceals under the big ulster overcoat the forked tail and 
lightnings of his unscrupulous intellect ! The Burns devil is, 
however, something kinder and more human than this univer- 
sal genius. In one poem Burns makes him an exciseman, and 
though not strictly defined, it may be said of him, as some one 
said of Raphael's devil in the Sistine Chapel, "If he is not the 
devil, it is some d— d thing or other." He would not have the 
devil here for a time, although he would not object to a " devil 
of a time." 

The truth is, we each carry our devil around with us as a 
part of our personality. Why should not Burns' idea of in- 
carnate evil be as jolly as himself, who was an exciseman ? 
And what pleasure could the exciseman take in the unnatural 
destruction or unjust distribution of Scotch whiskey ? I can 
well imagine how, in the regions of northern Scotland, where 
an Englishman (Shakespeare) located a "blasted heath," you 



27 

know, and peopled its air with beings of metaphysical entity, 
that a grand and terrific ideal of the spirit of evil should arise, 
like Hecate or the witches of Macbeth, from the dreary mists 
of the Highlands. But Burns' devil, while he once rode on 
the blasts with Tarn O'Shanter, had a more social way — as a 
government official. He was not a conservator of fruits and 
flowers, like you, Mr. President. He was a simple government 
detective. He seized spirits, it is true, as Satan does, and he 
confiscated them to the best purposes. He would have been 
an invaluable aid under any administration. I think he may 
now and then be detected in our " secret service." 

But, ladies and gentlemen, the genius of Burns was not lim- 
ited to creations of evil. It would have been more grateful to 
me this evening to have discussed the genial and etherial quali- 
ties of his song. How he sympathized with nature ; its beau- 
ties, its attractions, its humility, and its heart. How sweetly 
flowed the current of his rhyme, as he gave new purple to the 
heather and new blush to the rose ! How the hours winged 
their angel flight in the loved homes which he peopled with his 
genius! 

With all the splendid galaxy of Scotch intellect, and wherever 
the Scotch mind goes— as far as a thistle can fly, and as fre- 
quently as it can produce — no such name as that of Robert 
Burns has gone so far or been heralded so prodigally and 
warmly. If Watts in invention, Adam Smith in economy, 
Brougham in eloquence, Knox in theology, Hume in history, 
Sydney Smith in wit, Jeffrey in criticism, and Scott in fiction 
were all combined in one effulgent star, it would not equal the 
splendors of Burns ! When Burns wrote the couplet — 

" Hank is but the guinea's stamp, 
A man's the gowd for a' that " — 

he made his name foremost among those who have championed 
the natural nobilities of mankind. It expresses the ''legal 
tender" of the Creator! Fresh out of the natural "pockets," 
where the richest nuggets nestle, he drew the ingot which no 
alloy of human error ever tarnished or can ever destroy. A 
man's the gold for all that may happen to him in the accidents, 
fortunes, deprivations, and vicissitudes of time. As such he 
will be tested in the furnace of affliction, and in the great assay 
-when the genuine shall be separated from the counterfeit. 

I have referred to the intellect of Scotland, whose honors are 
recorded by Buckle. Where has not that intellect gone ? Is it 
limited to any hemisphere or sphere ? Is not Livingstone him- 
self a Scotchman? He went into the very heart of Africa. 
When Burns sings that a man's a man, I know just what he 
means. Why, sir, there is a splendid Presbyterian barber in 
this city — as black as black can be. His name is Campbell. 
He comes of the clan. He is surely a Scotchman. I know it, 
if not by his slogan, then by his brogan. But if the Scotch 



28 

Livingstone could find tbe interior of Africa, why may not 
Campbell ? My distinguished friend from North Carolina, (Mr. 
Waddell,) who honors his State as well by his studies as by his 
political eminence, who is now present and blushing while I 
speak, made an interesting brochure to prove that the Welsh 
and Irish were in North Carolina in the 12th century. A 
fortiori, why should not the Campbells be found in Africa ? 

In conclusion, therefore, I rise from the spirit of deviltry 
enshrined in the poetry of our bard to those other and more 
elevated creations which have added a lustre to Caledonia, and 
made a new history for the lyric muse ! May your enjoyment 
of this anniversary be unalloyed by the presence of any other 
than that of the blithe and bonnie spirit which makes that 
muse as mirthful as it is immortal ! 

THE FESTIVAL OF 1876. 

Mr. George Cowie, president, delivered a short but 
appropriate address, welcoming in a most cordial man- 
ner the guests of the Club, to the number of over six 
hundred, and then introduced Hon. Wm. P. Frye, of 
Maine, who spoke as follows: 

Mk. Pkesident : I saw in the press a few days since that I 
was to deliver an address before this Club ; that it would un- 
doubtedly sparkle with wit and abound in eloquence. What 
a sarcasm ! If I dreamed that you were expecting anything of 
this kind I should at once follow the example of the fellow 
who, having forced head and shoulders through his neighbor's 
paling, being discovered and accosted with, "You infamous 
scoundrel, where are you going?" replied, "Out," and went. 
I have no fountain on which I can draw at sight for eloquence 
and wit. I have a heai*t beating always in sympathy with Scot- 
land, and a love going out abundantly to Scotchmen and 
Scotchwomen. How could it be otherwise ? In the House I 
am flanked by my friends McDill and McDougal, while in my 
rear sit Wilson and Phillips, and right before me is the smil- 
ing, honest face of my old friend, the Cerberus of the Flower 
Garden, Smith. Besides, my wife, who came to me through 
the McDougals and Gregorys, is so much of a Scotchwoman 
that she rules her household with love and a rod — the rod being 
in the majority. So true is she to her ancestry, if she had been 
standing beside the stern old Scotchwoman who listened to 
the piteous appeals of Hume, the infidel, for help, as he was 
sinking in the quagmire, and made him repeat the Lord's 
Prayer and the Ten Commandments as condition precedent to 
his salvation, I think she would have cried "Amen and amen!" 
These reasons for sympathy surely ought to inspire me to say 
a few kind and honest words to you on this anniversary occa- 



29 

sion. Wherever I go, whatever circumstances surround me, 
I am loyal to the North. I am as true to it as was "John 
Hatteras " to the Pole. Even if I should go mad, as did he, 
still my steps, with his, would ever turn thitherward. I love 
its mountains and its valleys, its rivers and its lakes, its ice 
and its snow, its barrenness and its ruggedness. I love its 
men who earn their bread by the sweat of the brow ; who never 
saw that land which, "tickled with a hoe, would laugh with 
a harvest ; " who plough, harrow, dig with spade and mattock, 
and then are supremely content if only it smiles with an av- 
erage crop. They are hardy, honest, God-fearing, and coun- 
try-loving. The distinguished gentleman who is to deliver 
the address, to which this is only a feeble introduction, will 
forgive me, I know, If I seem somewhat exuberant over my 
own, even if he thinks my imagination is somewhat too warm 
over " the eternal solitudes of snow which mantle the ice- 
bound North." He can well afford to, for the man who made 
for the ignoble Duluthsuch a glorious immortality in an hour's 
time, is abundantly able to take care of the blue-grass regions 
of the fertile Kentucky or " the fragrant savannas of the sun- 
lit South." 

In early boyhood, romance and poetry had made sacred to 
me Old Scotia's Shores ; had clothed with a glorious immor- 
tality her Ben Lomond, Ben More, and Ben Ness ; her Clyde 
and her Tay, her Tweed and her Dee — crystallized them all 
into monuments of liberty, loyalty, and patriotism. And 
when later in life the pages of history opened to me I learned 
that neither novelist nor poet had told half of the wonderful 
story. Caledonia, waj back in the ages of darkness, peopled 
by fierce, savage, and idolatrous tribes, but brave and liberty- 
loving, almost alone of the nations, fought successfully the 
Roman empire ; so brave and so fierce were they that this 
mistress of the world thought it discreet to wall them in. 

Scotland, for more than a thousand years, for liberty and 
the right to worship God according to the dictates of con- 
science, fought the whole power of England, until the blood 
of her brave sons washed every mountain side, drenched every 
valley, tinged every lake and river. Now you know well that 
the cause a nation espouses and fights for has a reflex action 
upon her people. Spain fought for conquest and slavery, and 
to-day is a bankrupt beggar among the nations, impotent to 
hold in subjection one little Island of the Sea. 

Rome fought for glory and empire, and she is only known 
in history. Our Republic fought for liberty, equal rights, and 
humanity, and this year the world will join in her Centennial. 
Scotland came out from her fiery furnace of war purified. 
Those savage, idolatrous tribes of Caledonians gradually grew 
into the brave, intelligent, God-fearing soldiers, who just be- 
fore entering the battle at Bannockburn, to a man knelt, and 
with uplifted hearts and hands asked help from the God of 



30 

Battles. King Edward, seeing them, cried, " The cravens al- 
ready ask mercy;" to whom an English baron repled : "Sir, 
they ask no mercy of us ; they pray for help from God. They 
will conquer or die." And they conquered! Her chieftains, 
fierce and cruel, became the William Wallace, as brave as 
Henry, and as chivalrous as Baj r ard; the Robert Bruce, who 
could defend the pass against an army unaided, who could 
slay a score of armed men with his own bands, and yet be as 
gentle and tender as a woman ; who, when his army was re- 
treating before an overwhelming force of English and Irish, 
hearing one day an outcry, and on inquiry, learning that it 
was a poor camp-follower giving birth to a child, and in a 
terrible agony of fear lest she might fall into the hands of the 
" Child eating Barbarians," called a council of his officers, 
said to them, " Shame on the man born of woman, nursed 
by her tenderness, who will desert a mother in the hour of 
her travail and pain," ordered a halt of his army, and held 
them there until the woman recovered, then marched to the 
mountain in safety. That single act of gentleness consecrated 
his name bej r ond all the glories of the battle-field. The orator 
relates of Sir Philip Sidney, that mortally wounded, borne 
from the battle-field, thirsty and dying, a cup of cold water 
was passed to him ; he seeing a soldier by the roadside, gave it 
to him, saying, "Brother, thy necessities are greater than 
mine." That single act of self- forgetful sacrifice consecrated 
the name of Sidney more than all the battles fought or victories 
won. These are the highest type of the soldier, the christian 
soldier, the warrior of courage and gentleness. Slowly, but 
surely, Scotland climbed to the highest type of civilization, 
that born of education and religion, of the school and the 
Bible, of the altar of the Cotter's Saturday Night in every 
house. Look upon her in the 18th century. In the 17th it 
was enacted that a school-house should be erected in every 
parish, and a schoolmaster appointed. Early in the 18th her 
people were more generally educated than any other in Europe. 
The world knew and admired her historians, her poets, her 
philosophers, her scientists, and the nations paid tribute to her 
universities at Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrew's, and Aber- 
deen. The Edinburgh Review and Blackwood 's Edinburgh Maga- 
zine are to-day unrivalled in the world, while Edinburgh is the 
only rival of London in the British Empire as a publishing 
centre. In the arts, sciences, agriculture, and manufactures she 
has no occasion to hide her face. Such a country — so cold, so 
barren, so mountainous, so torn and distracted by ruthless 
wars — only 300 miles long and 200 wide, with such glorious 
fruits of the highest civilization ! Whence did it come ? From 
the perpetual contest for liberty and equal rights and religion, 
the school-book, and the Bible. This civilization, indigenous 
to the cold countries of the north, crossed the ocean, landed on 
the bleak, barren coast of Massachusetts, toiled, suffered, and 



31 

fought, until one hundred years ago, it declared, in words that 
shall live forever, making glad the hearts of toiling millions, 
" All men are created free and equal," and a clarion voice from 
Scotia's shore replied, ''A man's a man for a' that." Under its 
inspiration, independence was achieved, and England lost from 
her diadem one of its brightest jewels. But barbarism, too, 
had crossed the same ocean, landed on the friendly, fertile, and 
sunny shores of the South ; it flourished, grew strong and 
stronger, until it flaunted its black flag in the very face of civ- 
ilization, and threatened its own terrible supremacy. Then, 
again, this pure spirit of the North put on the armor, girded 
on the sword, and went forth to do battle. Trusting to the 
God of Battles, inspired with "A man's a man for a' that," it 
conquered, and no more forever shall a slave tread the wine- 
press in our fair land. The war over, Christian civilization 
said, forgive, poured out the balm of Gilead without stint or 
measure, and this Centennial year we have a country free, 
united, purified, and sanctified. 

More than a century ago this glorious Old Scotland, inspired 
by such a civilization, labored and brought forth a child, laid 
him in a mud-covered hut, gave him to a mother who loved 
the " dear God," and to a father who feared Him. Then the 
boy, with no lingering 'step, with satchel and book, went to the 
humble school, while at home the master and the mistress 
taught, 

" An' O, be sure to fear the Lord alway, 

And mind your duty duly morn and night ; 

Lest in temptation's path ye gang astray 
Implore His counsel an' assisting might, 

They never sought in vainthat sought the Lord aright." 

Thus instructed he grew apace, and next we find him a 
whistling plow-boy, turning the daisy beneath the share, and 
driving "the cruel coulter thro' poor mouser's cell." He 
studied, he worked, he prayed, he loved, he suffered — he sang, 
until one day he wrote his name, " Robert Burns, Poet." And 
one hundred years from the day this child was born, every city 
in the civilized world celebrated his anniversary. Historians, 
poets, philosophers, orators, and the great men of all lands 
paid him homage, while the lowly sang his praises. To no 
man was ever such homage paid before, and I think I may 
safely say that the name of " Robert Burns, Poet," has been 
and is dearer to more hearts than any other except alone that 
of Him who was born in a manger, toiled, suffered, and died 
that we might live. From whence came this wondrous power ? 
How did he win this priceless gift of universal love ? It was 
not bought with money. The price he paid was the mud-cov- 
ered hut, the sterile land, the poverty, the sorrow, the labor, 
the suffering life among the lowly. Scotland, her mountains, 
her glens, her lakes, her rivers, her battles, her heroes, her 
schools, and her altars, were his inspiration. Nature, with her 



32 

rod, touched his heart, and pure limpid streams of sympathy, 
of charity, of loyalty, of purity, of wisdom, of mirth, and of 
satire, sprang forth — heart speaking to heart. This is why all 
men have given him an immortality as tender, loving, and 
blessed as he gave to Mary in heaven. All men ; ah, no ! there 
are a few cold-blooded, puritanical — I beg pardon of the 
Puritans — Pharisees, who see in Burns the scoffer, the wine- 
bibber, the reveller, the keeper of low company. They stand 
upon a pedestal of ice and look down upon his warm, loving 
heart, and feel no responsive warmth in theirs. Even such 
must yield some respect to Burns, the exciseman. He per- 
formed his duties faithfully ; he was economical in his expen- 
ditures ; he stole no stamps, and though his salary was only 
fifty pounds a year he asked no back pay, demanded no in- 
crease, passed no crooked whiskey. To be sure, he was now 
and then late at his office, but, like Charles Lamb, went home 
early enough to make it up. Even Henderson, with all his 
eloquence, with all the facts in the case, forgetting his sworn 
duty as a prosecuting officer, and throwing into the scales 
against the prisoner all of the imaginary infamies of the most 
infamous administration of ancient or modern times, could 
not have forced from a jury of his peers a verdict of " guilty."' 

" Then fill the sparkling goblet high, 

And let no discord stain it ; 
Let joy illume each manly eye. 

While to the dregs we drain it ! 
To Burns ! To Burns ! The King of Song ! 

Whose lyre shall charm all ages ! 
Mirth, Wisdom, Love, and Satire strong. 

Adorn his deathless pages." 

Hon. J. Proctor Knott, of Kentucky, was next 
introduced, and addressed the assembly in the follow- 
ing happy vein : 

Mr. Chairman, when 1 received the very complimentary 
notice that I was expected to be present and address you this 
evening it occurred to me that the gentlemen who had it in 
charge to arrange the programme for the occasion had cer- 
tainly committed a most singular mistake. I could conceive 
of no possible reason why they should consider me capable of 
contributing a single additional ray to the resplendent halo 
which will forever encircle the immortal name of Scotland's 
favorite bard. It is true I had always felt proud, and perhaps 
somewhat more pious and patriotic than most people, on ac- 
count of my direct descent from the sturdy old Covenanters 
who fought for the faith of their fathers at Drumclog and 
Bothwell's Brigg, and whose descendants signed the original 
declaration of independence at Mecklenberg. Yet I can. 
scarcely refrain from exclaiming, in the language of my saintly 
old friend, Holy Willie : 

" What was I, or my generation, 
That I should get sic exaltation? " 



33 



gentleman whose eloquent periods still tingle through every 
fibre and tissue of our souls, and hold us as under the spell of 
some delicious enchantment, I am satisfied that you will agree 
with me in the opinion that they have been guilty of a still 
more egregious blunder — one, in fact, which ought to be suffi- 
cient to blast their reputation as literary caterers for all time to 
come — the miserable, unpardonable mistake at a festival like 
the present, of bringing on the bacon and cabbage after we 
have had the strawberries and ice cream. It is but charitable 
to suppose, and perhaps but justice to the gentlemen who in- 
vited me, to say that I am here to-night purely by mistake. 
For I cannot imagine that they could have had any secret 
malice against me which they wished to gratify by enticing me 
into one of the most difficult and trying positions I ever occu- 
pied in my life— the humiliating predicament of being com- 
pelled to realize, to its fullest extent, my own utter and abject 
poverty of thought and expression when measured by the 
theme upon which I am expected to speak. For what can I 
say of the genius of Robert Burns which has not been already 
said a thousand times, and that, too, with an elegance, a 
beauty, and a force of diction far beyond the reach of any 
power that I possess ? What single thought can I suggest to 
• any genuine lover of his species — especially to those whose 
halcyon days were spent on the "banks and braes o' bonnie 
Doon," or by the classic waters of " the winding Ayr" — that 
could make the pulse beat faster or the eye grow brighter than 
the simple mention of the poet's name ? Indeed, I have many 
and many a time remarked it as a most singular fact that you 
may take one by one the brightest stars in all the wondrous 
constellation of Scottish genius ; you might recite, if you 
could, with an angel's tongue, the story of their sublime achieve- 
ments in arms and in art, in science, in literature, in history, 
in politics, in poetry, in philosophy, or in theology, and you 
would fail to excite such a flame of national pride and enthusi- 
asm in any genuine Scotchman's bosom as will be kindled by 
simply mentioning the name of Burns. You may inscribe 
their names high as you will on the scroll of human fame, and 
he will write the name of his country's rustic poet high above 
them all ; even above that of Sir Walter Scott, the mighty 
monarch of the human heart — 

11 Who on mind's high steep could stand 
And marshal with his sceptered hand 
The whirlwind and the cloud, 
And write a name too bright to die, 
In lightning traces on the sky." 

The secret source of that mysterious magnetism which inva- 
riably attracts the w T arm, reverent affection of the Scottish 
heart to the deathless memory of their country's poet, and 
which will abate no jot of its resistless power while Ben Lo- 



34 

mond stands or the Tweed rolls onward to the sea, lies far 
deeper than the mere sentiment of national pride or passionate 
patriotism. It is not because he delighted to delineate, in their 
own beautiful and expressive dialect, the delicate shades of 
Scottish feeling, or the peculiarities of thought and manners 
exhibited in the life of the Scottish peasant. It is not because 
his graphic pictures of rural life, his marvellous descriptions of 
local scenery, his resistless bursts of rarest humor, and the ra- 
diant brilliancy of his inimitable flashes of wit are all tinged 
in every lineament with a patriotic pride in the land which 
gave him birth and a deathless love for his native heath. It is 
not for any of these reasons alone, nor yet for all of them com- 
bined, that Burns occupies the first and highest place in the 
affections of his countrymen. 

It is because he was not simply the poet of Scotland, but the 
poet of humanity everywhere! It is because he possessed, as 
no other poet ever did, the universal alchemy of genius which 
enabled him to bring to light the pure virgin gold in everything 
he touched. It is because there is not a single fibre in the 
heart of any human being which cannot be touched in some 
way by the simple magic of his unaffected muse. It is be- 
cause the majestic soul exhibited in his artless lays was as ex- 
pansive as his race. As I have seen it somewhere said of him, 
" Born in obscurity, reared in adversity, rejoicing in the smiles 
of nature, and scorning the frowns of fortune, he lived and 
died the poet of the people — the great unnumbered masses who 
eat their humble bread in the sweat of their own honest 
brows." Other great poets had their own peculiar excellen- 
cies. Milton, awed by a sublimer theme and loftier language ; 
Shakespeare delighted while he instructed mankind in a deeper 
and a more diversified philosophy ; Byron challenged admira- 
tion by bolder and wilder flights of the imagination ; but the 
Scottish peasant stands alone and peerless in painting the joys 
and the sorrows, the agonies and the transports of the humble 
sphere in which he lived. Of all lyric poets the most prolific 
and versatile, the simplest and the most touching, and to his 
own class the truest and the most elevating. Aye, the most 
elevating ! " Holy Willie " will always elevate his sanctimon- 
ious nose at the " Jolly Beggars." He will never cease to point 
his pharisaical finger at "honest Tarn O'Shanter" and " Souter 
Johnnie," and you may take your " Bible oath" that whenever 
he recurs to the scene at " Poosie Nancy's," or when " Willie 
brewed a peck o' maut, and Ra*b and Allan cam to pree," he 
will turn up the whites of his pious eyes in "holy rapture," 
and exclaim : 

" I biess an' praise thy matchless might, 
Whan thousands thou has left in night, 
That I am here afore thy sight, 

For gifts and grace, 
A burnin' and a shinin' light 

To a' this ulace. 



35 

" Yet I am here, a chosen sample ; 
To show thy grace is great an' ample ; 
I'm here a pillar in thy temple, 

Strong as a rock, 
A guide, a buckler, an' example, 

To a' thy flock." 

Yet there is a fervid piety pervading every line of the "Cot- 
ter's Saturday Night," of which such canting hypocrites are 
as utterly ignorant as the inhabitant of the farthest hill-top of 
Nova Zeinbla is of the perfumed zephyrs that sigh through the 
flowery vales of Araby the blest. There is a purity of senti- 
ment, a refinement of feeling, and a delicacy of thought in 
the address to the "Wee, modest crimson-tipped flower." of 
which such thin-blooded, hollow-hearted, soulless shams have 
no more conception than a milestone has of the sublimest 
symphonies of Mozart or Mendelssohn. When I speak of the 
elevating influence of turns' poetry, however, I do not allude 
simply to those marvellously beautiful scintillations of thought 
or those exquisitely delicate expressions of refined and ennob- 
ling sentiments which are found scattered like unstrung dia- 
monds through almost everything that ever emanated from 
his pen, but to the dignity of the manhood which beams out 
of almost every line he ever wrote. 

He has been called the poet of the poor. Not because he 
spent his genius in piteous wailing for the hardships and 
miseries of the millions whose lives are doomed to a ceaseless 
round of toil ; not because he taught them to repine at their 
condition, nor yet to despise or envy the advantages of rank 
and wealth and culture, but because he taught them to realize 
the dignity and majesty of their own nature, and to stand erect 
in. the image of their Creator. It is this sublime philosophy, 
this graud pivotal idea in all the creations of his genius, that 
makes him truly the poet of humanity everywhere, and ren- 
ders his name and memory sacred, not only with his own 
countrymen, but with honest, high-minded, whole-souled men 
everywhere. 

There is another particular in which Burns has been rarely, 
if ever, equalled, and which renders his poetry peculiarly 
fascinating to all classes of men and to every grade of the hu- 
man intellect ; I mean its aphoristic character — the wealth of 
wisdom he sometimes puts up in the smallest packages. For 
example, out of the innumerable instances which might be 
cited, what could possibly be more expressive of the utter un- 
certainty of all human calculations than his simple line : 

" The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley." 

Where can be a more stinging rebuke to human vanity and 
self-conceit than in his oft-quoted ejaculation — 

" Oh, wad some power the giftie gie us 
To see oursels as ithers see us ? " 



36 

In the simple power of word-painting — no, not painting, but 
that marvellous faculty of producing a real life-picture by a 
few rapid strokes of his magic pencil — Burns was never ap- 
proached by any other poet that ever lived on earth. As an 
illustration of this I will pass by his universally acknowledged 
master-pieces and select at random a single sketch from his 
almost illimitable gallery. Take, for instance, a single verse 
from the address " To a Haggis :" 

11 His knife see rustic labor dight 
And cut you up wi' ready slight. 
Trenching your gushing entrails bright 

Like ony ditch ; 
And then, oh, what a glorious sight, 
Warin-reekin', rich ! " 

Can't you see the delicious, tempting dish steaming before 
them ? Does not the delightful odor it exhales upon the sur- 
rounding air make your very mouth water ? Then see the 
auld guidman and his " buirdly cheels," armed with their horn 
spoons, rushing to the attack : 

11 Then horn for horn they stretch and strive,. 
De'il tak' the hindmost, on they drive, 
Till a' their weel-swall'd kytes belyve 

Are bent like drums ; 
Then auld guidman, maist like to rive, 

8 Bethankit ' hums." 

Why, Tennyson's world-renowned description of the charge 
of the six hundred at Balaklava cannot compare with it. 

There is yet another peculiarity in which Burns stands with- 
out a parallel in the annals of poetic literature, and that is in 
the simple, unaffected patriotism and the manly pride in his 
own class which crops out in almost every sentence that flowed 
from his untutored pen. I need go no further for an illustra- 
tion of this than the very poem from which I have just quoted, 
where he contrasts the child of affluence, reared on dainty 
viands, and the hardy, haggis-fed peasant of his native heather. 
Look at this picture : 

" Poor devil ! See him owre his trash, 
As feckless as a wither'd rash, 
His spindle shank a guid whip-lash, 

His nieve a nit ; 
Thro' bloody flood or field to dash, 

Oh how unfit ! 

But mark the rustic, haggis-fed, 

The trembling earth resounds his tread, 

Clap in his walie nieve a blade, 

He'll mak' it whissle ; 
And legs, and arms, and heads will shed, 

Like taps o' thrissle." 

Nevertheless, as I have already said, mankind will never 
consent that Burns shall be monopolized by a single nation. 
Humanity loves and claims him. Vast as would be the chasm 



37 

in the literature of bis own country if the glorious offspring of 
his genius were stricken from it, vaster still would be the void 
in the universal heart of man if the wide space filled by the 
memory of Burns would be empty ; a memory which will 
grow brighter and yet brighter until time itself shall wax old 
as doth a garment, and the heavens be rolled together as a 
scroll. 



BURNS. 

[On seeing a lock of Highland Mary's hair in the Bxims 
monument at Ayr, Scotland ] 
[From Scotch American, 1872.] 

Oh, thou fair lock, thou tress of palish gold ! 

What thronging memories come at sight of thee ! 
How is the scroll of time again unrolled, 

Revealing that which never more may be. 

I see thee waving round a brow of snow. 

As gently by the summer wind caressed, 
And wanton o'er a cheek of softest glow, 

Or nestle loving on a poet's breast. 

And once again the hawthorn's snowy bough 

Scatters its sweets upon the evening air; 
Again I hear the poet's raptured vow 

That bids thee know that " bliss beyond compare." 

And thou haRt felt the throb of that great heart, 
That Sorrow's darkest frown could not subdue, 

But braving angry Fortune's fiercest dart, 
Was still to manhood and affection true. 

Oh, Scotia ! wellmayst thou love thy rustic bard ; 

For who, like he, has told it far and wide, 
What generous bosoms, noble hearts and true, 

Are wont beneath the hodden-gray to hide ? 

How thine own children, in their lowly shades, 

At Poverty's chill fount may oft have drank, 
But "blessed with health and peace and sweet content," 

May still defy the guinea stamp of rank. 

Oh, wond'rous bard ! thy genius, spark divine, 

Does still this very atmosphere pervade ; 
And in its light thy human frailties tine 

As morn's obscuring mists before the sun must fade. 

Oh, wond'rous bard ! we still this truth must own, 

That thou in magic numbers erst did say ; 
Of all the meteor-lights around thee thrown, 

'Twas light from heaven that led thy steps astray. 

Oh, Scotia ! as in the years Time's ceaseless course has run, 
Through what may come to thee by Fortune's future turns, 

Acknowledge him thy own, thy darling son, 
And still adore the name of Robert Burns. 

Mrs. Wm. E. Smith. 



38 



BUKNS. 

To a Roue, brought from near Alloway Kirk, in Ayrshire, in the autumn 
of 1822. 



"Wild Rose of Alloway ! my thanks ; 

Thou 'mindst me of that autumn 
noon 
When first we met upon *' the banks 

And braes o' bonny Doon." 

Like thine, beneath the thorn-tree's 
bough, 
My sunny hour was glad and brief, 
We've crossed the winter sea, and 
thou 
Art withered— flower and leaf. 

And will not thy death-doom be 
mine — 
The doom of all things wrought of 
clay— 
And withered my life's leaf like thine, 
Wild Rose of Alloway ? 

Not so his memory, for whose sake 
My bosom bore thee far and long, 

His — who a humbler flower could 
make 
Immortal as his song. 

The memory of Burns — a name 
That calls, when brimmed her fes- 
tal cup, 

A nation's glory and her shame, 
In silent sadness up. 

A nation's glory— be the rest 
Forgot — she's canonized his mind ; 

And it is joy to speak the best 
"We may of human kind. 

I've stood beside the cottage bed 
Where the Bard-peasant first drew 
breath ; 

A straw-thatched roof above his head, 
A straw-wrought couch beneath. 

And I have stood beside the pile, 
His monument — that tells to 
Heaven 

The homage of earth's proudest isle 
To that Bard-peasant given ! 

Bid thy thoughts hover o'er that 
spot, 
Boy-Minstrel, in thy dreaming 
hour; 
And know, however low his lot, 
A Poet's pride and power. 

The pride that lifted Burns from 
earth, 

The power that gave a child of song 
Ascendency o'er rank and birth. 

The rich, the brave, the strong. 

And if despondency weigh down 
Thy spirit's fluttering pinions then 
Despair— thy name is written on 
The roll of common men. 



There have been loftier themes than 
his, 
And longer scrolls, and louder 
lyres, 
And lays lit up with Poesy's 
Purer and holier fires : 

Yet read the names that know not 
death; [there; 

Few nobler ones than Burns are 
And few have won a greener wreath 

Than that which binds his hair. 

His is that language of the heart, 
In which the answering heart 
would speak, 
Thought, word, that bids the warm 
tears start. 
Or the smile light the cheek ; 

And his that music, to whose tone 
The common pulse of man keeps 
time, 

In cot or castle's mirth or moan, 
In cold or sunny clime. 

And who hath heard his song, nor 
knelt 

Before its spell with willing knee, 
And listened, and believed, and felt 

The Poet's mastery. 

O'er the mind's sea, in calm and 

storm, [showers, 

O'er the heart's sunshine and its 

O'er Passion's moments bright and 

warm, 

O'er Reason's dark, cold hours ; 

On fields where brave men " die or 
do," 
In halls where rings the banquet's 
mirth, 
Where mourner's weep, where lovers 
woo, 
From throne to cottage hearth ? 

What sweet tears dim the eyes un- 
shed, 
What wild vows falter on Ihe 
tongue, 
When "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace 
bled," 
Or "Auld Lang Syne " is sung ! 

Pure hopes, that lift the soul above. 

Come with his Cotter's hymn of 

praise, 

And dreams of youth, and truth, and 

love, 

With kk Logan's " banks and braes. 

And when he breathes his master-lay 
Of Alloway's witch-haunted wall, 

All passions in our frames of clay 
Come thronging at his call 



39 



Imagination's world of air, [glee, 
And our own world, its gloom and 

"Wit, pathos, poetry, are there, 
And death's sublimity. 

And Burns— though brief the race he 

ran, [trod, 

Though rough and dark the path he 

Dived— died— in form and soul a 

Man, 

The image of his God. 

Through care and pain, and want and 
wo, [heal, 

With wounds that only death could 
Tortures— the poor alone can know, 

The proud alone can feel ; 

He kept his honesty and truth, 
His independent tongue and pen. 

And moved, in manhood as in youth, 
Pride of his fellow men. 

Strong sense, deep feeling, passions 
strong, 

A hate of tyrant and of knave, 
A love of right, a scorn of wrong, 

Of coward and of slave. 

A kind true heart, a spirit high, 
That could not fear and would not 
bow, 

"Were written in his manly eye 
And on his manly brow. 

Praise to the bard! his words are 
driven. 
Like flower-seeds by the fair winds 
sown, 
Where'er beneath the sky of heaven, 
Tne birds of fame have flown. 

Praise to the mau ! a nation stood 
Beside his coffin with wet eyes, 

Her brave, her beautiful, her good, 
As when a loved one dies. 

And still, as on his funeral day, 
Men stand his cold earth-couch 
around, 

"With the mute homage that we pay 
To consecrated ground. 



And consecrated ground it is, 
The last, the hallowed home of one 

Who lives upon all memories, 
Though with the buried gone. 

Such graves as his are pilgrim's 
shrines, 
Shrines to no code or creed con- 
fined— 
The Delphian vales, the Palestines, 
The Meccas of the mind. 

Sages with wisdom's garland 
wreathed, 
Crowned kings, and mitred priests 
of power, 
And warriors with their bright sword 
sheathed, 
The mightiest of the hour ; 

And lowlier names, whose humble 
home 
Is lit by Fortune's dimmer star. 
And there — o'er wave and mountain 
come, 
From countries near and far ; 

Pilgrims whose wandering feet have 
pressed 
The Switzer's snow, the Arab's 
sand, 
Or trod the piled leaves of the West, 
My own green forest-land. 

All ask the cottage of his birth, 
Gaze on the scenes he loved and 
sung, 

And gather feelings not of earth 
His fields and streams among. 

They linger by the Doon's low trees. 
And pastoral Nith, and wooded 
Ayr, 
And round thy sepulchres, Dum- 
fries ! 
The poet's tomb is there. 

But what to them the sculptor's art, 
His funeral columns, wreaths and 
urns? 
Wear they not graven on the heart 
The name of Robert Burns ? 

- Fitz- Gi tei e Halleck. 



40 



ODE TO THE MEMORY OF BURXS 



BY THOMAS CAMPBELL. 



Soul of the Poet ! wheresoe'er, 
Reclaimed from earth, thy genius 

plume 
Her wings of immortality : 
Suspend thy harp in happier sphere, 
And with thine influence illume 
The gladness of our jubilee. 

And fly like fiends from secret spell, 
Discord and strife, at Burns' name, 
Exorcised by his memory ; 
For he was chief of bards that swell 
The heart with songs of social flame, 
And high delicious revelry. 

And love's own strain to him was 

given 
To warble all its ecstacies 
With Pythian words unsought, un- 

will'd— 
Love, the surviving gift of Heaven, 
The choicest sweet of Paradise. 
In life's else bitter cup distill'd. 

Who that has melted o'er his lay 
To Mary's soul, in heaven above, 
But pictured sees, in fancy strong, 
The landscape and the livelong day 
That smiled upon their mutual love ? 
Who that has felt forgets the song ? 

Nor skill'd one flame alone to fan ; 
His country's high-sould peasantry 
What patriot-pride he taught ! how- 
much 
To weigh the inborn worth of man ! 
And rustic life and poverty 
Grow beautiful beneath his touch. 

Him. in his clay-built cot, the Muse 
Entranced, and show'd him all the 

forms 
Of fairy like and wizard gloom 
(That only gifted Poet views), 
The genii of the floods and storms, 
And marshal shades from Glory's 

tomb. 

On Bannock-field what thoughts 

arouse 
The swain whom Burns' song in- 
spires ! 
Beat not his Caledonian veins, 
As o'er th' heroic turf he ploughs, 
With all the spirit of his sires 
And all their scorn of death and 
chains ? 

And see the Scottish exile, tann'd 
By many a far and foreign clime, 
Bend o'er his home-born verse, and 
weep 



In memory of his native land, 
With love that scorns the lapse of 

time, 
And ties that stretch beyond the 

deep ! 

Encamp'd by Indian rivers wild, 
The soldier, resting on his arms, 
In Burns' carol sweet recalls 
The scenes that blessed him when a 
child, [charms 

And glows and gladdens at the 
Of Scotia's woods and waterfalls. 

Oh deem not, 'midst this worldly 

strife, 
An idle art the Poet brings : 
Let high Philosophy control 
And sages calm the stream of life, 
'Tis he refines its fountain-springs, 
The nobler passions of the soul. 

It is the Muse that consecrates 
The native banner of the brave, 
Unfurling, at the trumpet's breath, 
Rose, thistle, harp ; 'tis she elates 
To sweep the field or ride the wave, 
A sunburst in the storm of death ! 

And thou, young hero, when thy pall 
Is cross'd with mournful sword and 

plume. 
When public grief begins to fade, 
And only tears of kindred fall, 
Who but the Bard shall dress thy 

tomb, 
And greet with fame thy gallant 

shade ! 

Such was the soldier — BuRNs,forgive 
That sorrows of mine own intrude 
In strains to thy great memory due. 
In verse like thine, oh ! could he live, 
The friend I mourn'd — the brave, 

the good — 
Edward that died at Waterloo ! 

Farewell,high chief of Scottish song! 
That couldst alternately impart 
Wisdom and rapture in thy page, 
And brand each vice with satire 

strong. 
Whose lines are mottoes of the heart, 
Whose truths electrify the sage. 

Farewell ! and ne'er may envy dare 
To wring one baleful poison-drop 
From the crush'd laurels of thy bust: 
But while the lark sings sweet in air, 
Still may the grateful pilgrim stop, 
To bless the spot that holds thy dust. 






41 



^Reprinted, by special permission of Mr. Andrew Carnegie, from 
Liber Scriptorum, "-The First Book of The Authors Club'" 
1893.] 

GENIUS ILLUSTRATED FROM BURNS. 
By Andrew Carnegie. 

Days come to all in this life when control of the mind is lost. 
The brain refuses to be harnessed and to do our bidding. The 
will is no longer master. It refuses to work or even to be in- 
terested. The charms pall which hitherto have never failed to 
allure it and bring it back to peace ; but as these days of trial 
gradually soften, and hope returns, the unruly steed, the brain, 
submits again to some degree of discipline. 

It was my fate last winter to pass through weary months of 
agonizing fear, and it may be interesting, perhaps, to others to 
note my experience, and learn what first enabled me to regain 
desired control of myself, for a man should no more permit 
his thoughts than his horse to run away with him. The brain 
must be made to tread the desired paths and answer bridle and 
spur instantly. He who cannot dismiss a subject from his 
thoughts at will is not master of himself. After many day and 
night walks around the library, and the handling of book after 
book, every one more insipid than another, and all pushed 
back, and no rest found, it came upon me one day that a search 
through my favorite Burns for nothing but pure gems would 
be an interesting excursion. I should dig from the mine only 
gems, and build an Aladdin's palace of dazzling beauty with 
the glittering stones ; should gather them together in a pile, 
and gloat over them as the Prince of Ind over his jewels or the 
miser over his heaps of gold ; should string them together as 
a rosary, and count my beads as holy men do, and thus bring 
peace to the troubled soul. No dainty repast upon the delica- 
cies bred in a book would answer. I here must revel and gorge 
to surfeit — no sip of the nectar of the gods, but unlimited 
draughts, even to mental intoxication, would give peace and 
refuge from the " brain still beating on itself." 

This idea was the first which interested me. It naturally 
led to speculations upon the nature of literary genius. 

Men have exercised themselves inventing definitions for 
genius, as men have sought for the Philosopher's Stone or for 
perpetual motion, and with like disappointment, for none of 
these three things is to be found. Certainly genius is not to 
be defined ; it is a thing of the spirit, and assumes too many 
forms for words to embrace. " An infinite capacity for taking 
trouble" is one attempt; "genius is work," another. Both 
seemingly describe the very reverse of the quality to which 
we apply the word genius. "Talent does what it can, genius 
what it must " comes nearer to it ; true in a sense, but not all 
the truth. While it is impossible to define genius, I said to 



42 

myself, Let us try whether we cannot at least discern it, lay 
our fingers upon it, saying, Lo ! here is the genuine essence. 

Gems are proverbially small. In the vast mines of literature 
we find them surrounded with much ordinary material. The 
gem itself is comprised in a line or a word, which should be 
easily recognized. When it is found we cry " Eureka ! " with 
safety. Here it is. This is genius. We say of much that pre- 
cedes and follows this one line, or two, in rare instances this 
one word or two : " Several could have written this— talent is 
equal to it ; but this one word or line, never. That comes not 
from a toiler below looking upward. The gods threw this 
from above into the soul of genius." Talent has climbed 
Parnassus, crag over crag, with us upon its shoulders, and 
called upon us to look back and enjoy the lovely pastoral 
scene below. Genius alone has sealed the height, and revealed 
to us the enchanted land beyond and over the mountain-top 
and all around the vaulted dome. 

The fire of genius, we say, and all are agreed that one 
essential element of genius is this "fire." No amount of 
smoke, no amount of heat suffices. The smoke passes away, 
the heat becomes intense, and the flame bursts forth, or 
genius there is none. Wherever genius touches, the divine 
spark sets fire to the pile. 

The test of genius in any writer, therefore, seems to be 
whether he has power to lead the understanding and sympa- 
thetic reader step by step, line after line, into regions more 
and more elevated, stirring the heart, the altar upon which the 
Godlike is placing the elements which he is to set blazing anon. 

It will be admitted that if the title of genius can be properly 
applied to any human being, it is to that phenomenon, the 
Scottish plowman. No one questions but that he was a pure 
child of genius. 

I took the works of the poet from their place of honor, next 
those of the " god of gods" in the kingdom of poetry. My 
working copy begins with the "Twa Dugs," the Newfoundland 
of the lordling, with its " braw brass collar," and the other the 
wisest and truest of all, that which creeps farthest into the 
core of the heart— the Scotch collie. The dog of the poor 
poet describes the joys of his own humble home. Here is a 
picture of the home of honest poverty which sets all dancing, 
young and old, as happy as only careless poverty can be : 

M As bleak-fac'd Hallowmas returns, 
- Th«y get the jovial, ranting kirns, 
When rural life, o' ev'ry station, 
Unite in common recreation ; 
Love blinks. Wit slaps, an' social Mirth 
Forgets there 's Care upo' the earth. 

The canty auld folks crackin' crouse, 
The young anes rantin' thro' the house,— 
My heart has been sae fain to see them, 
That I for joy hae barkit ivV them." 



43 

Here in one line lies the gem ; here is genius. The elements 
liave taken fire. That collie has a soul ; he is one of the 
family, as the collie always is in the home of the Scotch 
peasant. Every collie in the world has been elevated in social 
status since the pen of genius made him one of that joyous 
throng. He sings his song, speaks his piece, dances with the 
Test, and contributes his part to the general happiness. Talent 
would probably have forgotten him altogether. It could never 
have seen that the needed music to cap the joyous scene might 
he invoked out of his bark. No ; that is just the one step, the 
4 'little more" of Michael Angelo's definition of genius. 

Two lines at the close of this poem call for notice. These 
hairy philosophers sitting on the heather hills have told each 
other much of the trials and disadvantages of life in the palace 
and in the cottage ; for there are advantages and disadvantages 
in both, though we have Marcus Aurelius's word for it, that 
" life can be lived well even in a palace." The sun had set, 
the gloaming was coming on — 

" When up they gat, and shook their lugs, 
Rejoiced they were na men but dugs." 

There is no use in enlarging upon that last line. The reader 
who does not feel it to be a stroke of genius can never be made 
to see it. But who can fail to feel it ? The poem ends with 
it, and goes out in a blaze. The line crystallizes and passes 
into literature as one of its gems. Genius, nothing but genius. 
Burns, like Milton, always betrays an extraordinary partiality 
for the devil. It would be difficult to illustrate genius better 
than by quoting several lines from his address to that wicked 
imp. One is tempted to quote several, but let us take the last 
verse only : 

" But, fare you weel, auld NJckie-ben ! 

wad ye tak a thought an 1 men 1 ! 
Ye aiblins might — I dinna ken- 
Still hae a stake— 

1 'm wae to think upo' yon den, 

E'en for your sake ! " 

Talent, even of the highest order, would have stopped much 
short of such a farewell. It might have tendered some good 
advice, ponderously delivered. Genius alone could have sug- 
gested the possible repentance and reformation of the very 
spirit of evil ; and the suggestion is so delicately .conveyed — 
nothing of the preacher, no denunciation, just a friendly word 
at parting. And so Burns takes leave of his Infernal Majesty 
lovingly, anxious for his future improvement and happiness. 
The poet would not do even Old Nick a bad turn ; he would do 
him a good turn if he could. The spark is in this line. The 
glow of sympathy becomes all-pervading, sympathy with mis- 
fortune in all its phases, and we feel that he " prayeth best 
who" not only " loveth best all things, both great and small," 
but all things, even evil things, loveth he so, that he prays 
their return to the better path. 



44 

The dying words of poor Maillie, the plowman's pet ewe, fur 
nish several gems. The dying sheep gives advice to her lambs, 
and two lines inculcate a lesson at least as valuable as any other 
that can be given to lambs in the form of young men and women. 
For those who eschew bad company are safe. 

" But aye keep mind to moop an' mell 
Wi' sheep o' credit like thysef I " 

The address closes with the four following lines : 

" And now, my bairns, wi' my last breath, 
I lea'e my blessin' wi' you baith : 
An" 1 when you think upo 1 your mither, 
Mind to be kin' to ane anither.'''' 

A sermon in two lines for every family in the world. If there 
be brothers and sisters at variance anywhere, who can with- 
stand these lines and remain apart, Heaven help them ! Not 
the note, this, which sets fire to the blood ? But genius has 
another test not less searching than that of fire. The tear is 
also her own. The gracious drops from the fount of sorrow 
fall at her call. She alone strikes the hard heart with enchanted 
spear, and softens all into the sacred rain of tears. 

In the " Epistle to a Young Friend," amidst much good 
advice, we come to a stanza that blazes in these days of higher 
criticism and patching of human creeds which have too long 
passed for divine : 

" The fear o' hell 's a hangman'' s ivhip 

To haud the wretch in order ; 
But where ye feel your honor grip, 

Let that aye be your border : 
Its slightest touches, instant pause — 

Debar a' side pretences ; 
And resolutely keep its laws, 

Uncaring consequences." 

This sentiment will meet with general acceptance to-day. That 
Burns dared write it in his day is explicable only by the law 
that genius does what it must. 

Matthew Arnold says that for dramatic force equal to that 
displayed in " Tarn o' Shanter " and " The Jolly Beggars " we 
must look in the pages of Shakspere alone. The scene in 
Alloway Kirk, with witches and warlocks in a dance, would 
obviously have been incomplete without the presence of the 
head spirit of the fraternity himself. But what part would 
Old Nick play in such an entertainment ? To dance with the 
others would scarcely have comported with his regal dignity ; 
to stand apart would never do, for if there be any mischief 
afoot, he certainly must be in it. Goethe makes Mephisto- 
pheles draw the wine from the cask and put the sulphurous 
flame in it — a proper part, no doubt ; but these spirits of the 
air neither eat nor drink, yet the devil must do something 
among them. Here is the stroke of genius : 



45 

14 At winnock-bunker i' the east, 
There sat Auld Nick, in shape o' beast ; 
A towzie tyke, black, grim, au' large, 
To gie them music was his charge ; 
He screw'd the pipes and gart them skirl, 
Till roof and rafters a' did dirl." 

He gets at the very core of the whole matter. Without music 
no dance was possible, and Nannie could never have " lapped 
and flang." Those who dance must pay the piper ; and when 
Auld Nick himself sets the tune, as he often does, the devil 's 
to pay indeed; his scale of charges knows no maximum, and 
he is a sure collector. The next lines have a weird touch which 
is hard indeed to equal. One line contains the searched-for 
spark : 

44 Coffins stood round like open presses ; 

That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses ; 

And by some deev'lish cantraip slight 

Each in its cauld hand held a light." 

The idea of ranging the dead in their coffins around the ball- 
room of these spirits of darkness in their orgy might possibly 
have occurred to a clever poet; but what of the last touch? 
The "little more" lies just here — the cold hand of corpses 
made to serve as candlesticks to light the revels ! The element 
of the awful is thus introduced with appalling power. What a 
background for the picture ! Mirth and revelry — life at its 
flood ; the living ringed in and lighted up by the dead ! Tarn 
o' Shanter has too many of the sparks to be quoted fully — the 
picture of Tarn's home at the farm, for instance, when he was 
reveling at night in Ayr : 

44 Whare sits our sulky, sullen dame, 
Gath'rin' her brows like gath'rin' storm, 
Xursiri her wrath to keep it warm.'' 

The finger goes at once upon the last line. Burns knew the 
sex. Most wives are too good, sweet, tender, and self-sacrific- 
ing to do more than make-believe when they rebuke. Their 
wrath needs constant fuel, or down it all goes, perhaps too 
soon. 

In all that Burns has written there is nothing finer than 
" The Vision." He paints himself sitting in his hovel at night, 
the very den of poverty — an " auld clay biggin " filled with 
tormenting smoke. At last he falls asleep, and the " Genius 
of Scotland " comes to him in a dream. From beginning to 
end this is a poem filled with the brightest gems, rich in the 
divine sparks of genius. Mark the description of Scotia's 
Guardian Angel, who presides over the inspired natures who 
have made that little land one of the largest domains in the 
realm of the spirit, and the home of Poetry, Komance, and 
Song. 

"The Vision" tells him to "preserve the dignity of man 
with soul erect," and then follows the close. The highest test 
of the poet is the manner in which he touches the supernatural. 



46 

Men may easily call spirits from the vasty deep, but how to 
use them so that we preserve our gravity is known to few. 
Very few men, it is said, know how to take their departure 
from a room becomingly. It has troubled many a writer how 
to dispose of his supernatural visitor, and prevent " exit 
ghost " being followed by peals of laughter. What genius can 
do is seen in Hamlet's " Kemember me " as he noiselessly glides 
away. Banquo's exit with fiuger pointing to bloody throat is 
magnificent. True sparks indeed, especially the latter ; but 
even with that may we not rank this departure of ' ' The Vision " ? 

" ' And wear thou this,' — she solemn said 
And bound the holly round my head : 
The polished leaves, and berries red, 

Did rustling play ; 
And, like a passing thought, she fled 

In light aioay."' 

How could that peasant plowman in his smoky den ever con- 
ceive anything so exquisitely delicate as this ending ! I know 
nothing of the kind so perfect. One fondly lingers over — 

" And, like a passing thought, she fled 
In light away." 

Two words, but a Koh-i-noor. Genius! Inspiration ! 

There is something splendid in this poor plowman greeting 
himself, as a matter of course, as the inspired bard and placing 
the holly upon his own royal head. Supreme genius does 
know its powers and its heritage. Burns was indeed the Bard 
of Scotland and the rightful king. No man has risen to dis- 
pute his title to the crown. The holly still remains there, its 
leaves greener and its berries redder to-day than when bound 
around his head. 

The address to the mouse has been often quoted, but not the 
lines which to me contain the purest spark. Take the second 
stanza : 

'* I 'm truly sorry man's dominion 
Has broken Nature's social union, 
An' justifies that ill opinion 

Which makes thee startle 
At me, thy poor earth-born companion, 
An' felloiv-mortal I " 

Here is Darwinism for you. Talent could never have reached 
down so far as to become li fellow-mortal" to a mouse. Or if 
it might have condescendingly done this much, it never could 
have elevated the poor little mouse to companionship with 
man. It took genius to divine and so to announce in this 
fashion that "all flesh is kin." 

Here is an epitaph upon his friend and benefactor, Gavin 
Hamilton, from whom President Arthur was proud to claim 
descent. I remember he corrected me one day when I spoke 
of Gavin Hamilton. "Not Gavin Hamilton," said he. "You 
ought to know better. He was one of my ancestors, and it 
was always Gauin with my grandfather." 



47 

" The poor man weeps— here Gavin sleeps, 
Whom canting wretches blam'd ; 
But with such as he — where'er he be, 
May I be sav'd or damrid I " 

We all know those in this world with whom we should be 
willing to take our chances in the next, now that Burns has 
put the idea into our heads ; but who else would have gone so 
far as to print it for the first time ? 

We have not yet touched upon his songs. Take Bruce's 
Address, which Carlyle has called "the war-hymn of the ages." 
" The first stanza of ' Scots wha hae,' " said mediocrity, in the 
person of Thompson, the publisher, " will never do ; no leader 
would dare offer as an alternative to victory a gory bed to 
troops he wished to encourage." Death has been hailed, but 
death seems vague in comparison, and carries with it the sug- 
gestion of immediate passage to the abode of heroes. But 
Burns knew better than his critic, and replied : " That line 
must stand." And it stands for all time. 

" Welcome to your gory bed 
Or to victory." 

*' Scotland's right " or the " gory bed," the last welcome if the 
first fell. He stood for Scotland, body and soul, future or no 
future, Walhalla or Annihilation— it mattered not. At that 
supreme moment it was "Scotland forever !" 

In that well-known song, "John Anderson, my jo," we have 
the spark. Has any poet ever given in one verse such a picture 
of the union of two hearts as this ? 

" Now we maun totter down, John, 
But hand in hand we'll go ; 
And sleep thegitherat the foot, 
John Anderson, my jo." 

Up the hill, down the hill, through life, through death; " until 
death us do part " is the vow of marriage ; but when true mar- 
riage comes, death itself forces no separation. Through the 
dark shadow hand in hand, — and this much for comfort and 
content, — we shall "sleep thegither at the foot," certain as we 
lie down that there can be no heaven for one without the other, 
and prepared for anything in the future so we share it together. 
"To Mary in Heaven" seems not only so perfect, but so 
sacred that one instinctively hesitates to quote from it. It is 
the ideal lover's lament as clearly as " Scots wha hae" is the 
war song, or "Auld Lang Syne" the song of good fellowship, 
or "A man's a man for a' that" the song of democracy. But 
four lines I must quote, which follow the description of the 
meeting on the banks of Ayr, which, "gurgling, kissed its peb- 
bled shore " : 

" Still o'er these scenes my mf m'ry wakes, 
And fondly broods with miser care ! 
Time but th 1 impression stronger makes, 
As streams their channels deeper wear." 



48 

"What Burns might have been had Mary lived to be his wife 
opens the field of boundless conjecture. The history of this 
incomparable lament is fittingly touching. His wife tells that 
the poet not coming in at the usual evening hour she went in 
search of him, and found him lying on his back on a hayrick 
gazing at the evening star, so absorbed that she did not disturb 
him. He came in later, and going to his table, took pen and 
wrote this lament. The rapid change of mood in Burns has 
given rise to much surprise. Scott's devotion to his first love, 
whose sacred name he was discovered carving in Runic charac- 
ters when he was an old man, tells the tale in his case. This is 
contrasted with the succession of favorites of Burns ; but he 
too, though he sighed to many, loved but one. How sorry one 
is for the woman who was his wife : in the heart of her husband 
another sits enthroned. And what a line is that first one of the 
lament— six words of exquisite beauty, and such rhythm, shed- 
ding around the kindly light of genius : 

" Thou ling'ring star, ivith lessening ray, 
That lov'st to greet the early morn, 
Agnin thou usher'st in the day 
My Mary from my soul was torn." 

Truly, " Who says he has loved has never loved at all." 
And here comes " Holy Willie's Prayer." But this is no 
spark, the torch of genius illuminates every verse. We cannot 
pass it over altogether, and we might as well take the first 
fitauza as any other : 

" O thou, wha in the heavens does dwell, 
Wha. as it pleases best thysel', 
Sends ane to heaven, and ten to hell, 

A 1 for thy glory, 
And no for ony guid or ill 

They've done afore thee !" 

In the "Twa Herds" there is the spark — 

" Then Orthodoxy yet may prance, 
And Learning in a woodie dance, 
And that fell cur ca'd Common Sense, 

That bites sae sair, 
Be banished o'er the sea to France : 
Let him bark there." 

Common sense does bite indeed ! 

Matthew Arnold declares the " Jolly Beggars" the greatest 
work of Burns. Shakspere alone, says he, has equaled it for 
dramatic force. It is the veteran's turn to amuse the old tatter- 
demalions, and he gives them a rollicking song indeed. 

" I lastly was with Curtis, among the floating batt'ries, 
And there I left for witness an arm and a limb. 
Yet let my country need me, with Elliot to lead me, 
I'd clatter on my stumps at the sound of a drum." 

The one line again. If there be in literature such a picture as 
that suggested by the last line, I have not met with it. Did 





Mrs. THOS. BROWN, 

GRANDDAUGHTER OF ROBERT BLUNS. 



49 

Burns painfully think that out ? Muse over it? Labor away 
at that part or this part of it ? Or did the idea flash upon him 
like a stroke of lightning, and reveal that veteran moved to 
dancing upon his stumps at the very sound of the drum ? I 
believe it burst upon the poet at once, and that he was afraid 
he might lose the flash before he could write it down. But we 
must pass to the closing song which is sung as an encore by 
the bard of the gang, after which the curtain falls. The first 
and last verses I quote : 

" See ! the smoking bowl before us, 
Mark our jovial ragged ring ! 
Round and round take up the chorus, 
And in raptures let us sing. 

Chorus.— "A fig for those by law protected ! 
Liberty 's a glorious feast I 
Courts for cowards were erected, 
Churches built to p lease the x>riest." 

" Life is all a variorum, 

We regard not how it goes : 
Let them cant about decorum 
Who have characters to lose. 

" Here 's to budgets, bags, and wallets ! 
Here 's to all the wandering train ! 
Here 's our ragged brats and callets ! 
One and all cry out — Amen." 

There is an amen chorus for you ! The most gloriously wild 
rant in literature, as far as I know it, is this cantata. No 
wonder it was not published until after the death of the poet. 
If any man ever lived but Burns who could have written it, I 
have not heard of him. If he never had written anything else 
but this, he could never have been ignored as a poet. 

In the next we strike my favorite of all songs. I confess that 
with songs and tunes I am as fickle as Burns was with his fa- 
vorite lassies ; one queen gives place to another with surprising 
facility. Every summer spent on the moors among the heather 
brings a new favorite. But there also comes a loyal return to 
a former love now and then ; one that has reigned before and 
been dethroned for a time is restored and reigns again. Though 
not hereditary monarchs, these queens are eligible for reelec- 
tion. Thus " My Nannie 's Awa' " has served more terms than 
any, and is now again in the high office of Queen of Song. It 
is a shame to quote only a part of it, because every line seems 
a necessary step leading higher and higher until the region of 
fire is entered ; but two verses must be singled out from this 
prime favorite of the hour, as the highest crests where all is 
mountainous. 

" The snaw-drop and primrose our woodlands adorn, 
And violets bathe in the weet o' the morn ; 
They pain my sad bosom, sae sweetly they blaw, 
Thy mind me o' Nannie— and Nannie 's awa'! 



50 

" The lav'rock that springs frae the dews of the lawn, 
The shepherd to warn o' the grey-breaking dawn, 
And thou, mellow mavis, that hails the night fa', 
Give over for pity— my Nannie 's awa' !" 

Lying open before me on the opposite page comes the hymn 
of Triumphant Democracy : 

" The rank is but the guinea-stamp. 
The man T s the gowdfor a' that ."' 

The last verse sends that hymn singing throughout the world — 

" Then let us pray that come it may— 
As come it will for a' that— 
That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth, 
May bear the gree, and a' that. 

Tor a' that, and a' that, 

It 's comW yet,. for a" that, 
That man to man, the world o'er, 

Shall brothers be for a' that /" 

This was before Tennyson sang of the Parliament of Man and 
the Federation of the World. Burns, with the true insight of 
the poet-prophet, proclaims the brotherhood of man. 

I cannot leave my favorite in an attitude more pleasing than 
in singing tbe coming Brotherhood of Man. 

Whether these pages ever see the light or no, they have served 
their purpose, for many a weary anxious hour has the search 
for gems saved the writer, bringiDg to him something like calm , 
and once more " the taste of elevated joys," which comes to the 
tranquil mind. 



51 



LORD ROSEBERY'S SPEECHES AT DUMFRIES 
AND GLASGOW, JULY 21, 1896, ON THE OC- 
CASION OF THE BURNS' CENTENARY CELE- 
BRATION. 

(By Special Pei'tnission.^ 

Robert Burns : Scotland's best loved son and her 
patriot bard was born at Alio way, on 25th Jan- 
uary, 1759, and died on 21st July, 1796. A brief thirty- 
seven years, yet how much was crowded into their 
little span. Joys and sorrows, triumphs and disap- 
pointments, the consciousness of Heaven-given gen- 
ius, the keen pangs of remorseful memories, yet all 
these were needed to evoke that storm of feeling which 
has made him not only the hero of Scottish hearts, but 
the very sign and symbol of Scottish patriotism. 
Little wonder then that the Centenary of the death of 
Robert Burns should have elicited a display of pride 
and affection unequalled in the annals of any country 
under the sun. For one day Scottish reserve de- 
parted, as from every part of the globe came testi- 
monies and tributes to the memory of Robert Burns. 



At the Luncheon in the Mechanics* Hall, Dumfries, Lord Rose- 
bery Delivered the Following Address. 

Ladies and Gentlemen : I come here as a loyal burgess of 
Dumfries to do honor to the greatest burgess of Dumfries. 
You, Mr. Provost, have laid upon me a great distinction, but 
a great burden. Your most illustrious burgess obtained priv- 
ileges for his children in respect to his burgess-ship, but 
you impose on your youngest burgess an honor that might 
well break anybody's back— that of attempting to do justice 
in any shape or fashion to the hero of to-day's ceremony. 
Well, we citizens of Dumfries have a special claim to be 
considered on this day. We are surrounded by the choicest 
and the most sacred haunts of the poet. You have in your 
town the house in which he died, the Globe, where we could 
have wished that some phonograph had then existed which 
could have communicated to us some of his wise and witty 
and wayward talk. You have the street commemorated in 
M'Culloch's tragical anecdote when Burns was shunned by 
his former friends ; and you have the paths by the Nith 



52 

which are associated with some of his greatest works. You 
have near you the room in which " the whistle " was contested 
for, and in which, if some legend is to be trusted, the immor- 
tal Dr. Gregory was summoned to administer his lirst powders 
to the survivors of that memorable feast. You have the stack- 
yard in which, lying on his back and contemplating 

Thou lmg'ring star, with less'niug ray, 
That lov ; st to greet the early morn, 

he wrote the lines "To Mary in Heaven," perhaps the most 
pathetic of his poems. You have near you the walk by the 
river where, in his transport, he passed his wife and children 
without seeing them, his brow flushed and his eyes shining 
with the lustre of " Tarn o' Shanter." " I wish you had seen 
him," said his wife, "he was in such ecstasy that the tears 
were happing down his cheeks." That is why we are in Dum- 
fries to-day ; we come to honour Burns among these immortal 
haunts of his. But it is not in Dumfries alone that he is com- 
memorated to-day, for all Scotland will pay her tribute, 
and that is surely hers of right. Mankind owes him a 
general debt, but the debt of Scotland is a special one, 
for Burns exalted our race ; he hallowed Scotland and 
the Scottish tongue. Before his time we had been sccrcely 
recognized. We had been passing out of the recollec- 
tion and recognition of the world. From the time of the 
Union of the Crowns, and still more from the time of the legis- 
lative union, Scotland had lapsed into obscurity. Except for 
an occasional riot or a Jacobite rising, her existence was almost 
forgotten. She had indeed her Robertsons and her Humes, 
writing history to general admiration, but no trace of Scottish 
authorship was discoverable in their works; indeed, every 
flavour of national idiom was carefully obliterated. The Scot- 
tish dialect, as Burns called it, was in danger of extinction ; 
and Burns seemed at this juncture to start to his feet and re- 
assert Scotland's claim to a national existence. His Scottish 
notes rang through the world ; he preserved the Scottish lan- 
guage forever — for mankind will never allow to die that idiom 
in which his p'oems and his songs are enshrined. This is a part 
and only a part of Scotland's debt to Burns. But it is much 
more than a Scottish demonstration, and therefore I will not 
linger longer on Scotland's debt. It is a collection of represen- 
tatives from all quarters of the globe to own the common alleg- 
iance and the common faith. It is not only Scotsmen honour- 
ing the greatest of Scotsmen — we are stretched to-day far be- 
yond a kingdom or a race. We are a sort of poetical Mohamme- 
dans gathered in a sort of poetical Mecca. And yet, ladies and 
gentlemen, we are assembled to-day in our high enthusiasm 
under circumstances which are somewhat paradoxical, for with 
all the appearance of joy we celebrate not a festival but a 
tragedy. It is not the sunrise but the sunset that we commem- 



53 

orate. It is not the birth of a new power into the world, the 
subtle germ of a fame that is to survive and to inspire the 
generations of men. Bat it is perhaps more fitting that we 
celebrate the end and not the beginning. For the coming of 
these figures is silent. It is their passing that we note. At 
this instant that I speak, there may be born into the world the 
equal of a Newton or a Caesar, but half of us will be dead before 
he has revealed himself. Their death is different. It may be 
gloomy and disastrous ; it may come at a moment of shame 
and neglect. But by their time the man has carved his name 
somewhere in the temple of fame. There are exceptions, of 
course, exceptions where the end comes before the slightest 
or all but the slightest recognition — Chatterton choking in his 
garret : hunger of body and soul all unsatisfied ; Millet selling 
his pictures for a song ; nay Shakespeare himself. But as a 
rule death in the case of genius closes the first act of a public 
drama. Criticism and honours may then begin their unbiassed 
work free from jealcusy or friendship or personal consideration 
for the beginning. Then comes the third act, if a third act there 
be. No, it is a death, not a birth, that we celebrate to-day. 
This clay a century ago, in poverty, and delirium, and distress 
there was passing the soul of Robert Burns. To him death 
comes in clouds and darkness — the end of a long agony of body 
and soul. He is harassed with debt ; his bodily constitution 
is ruined ; his spirit is broken ; his wife is daily expecting her 
confinement ; he has lost almost all that rendered his life 
happy, much of friendship, credit, and esteem. Some score 
of years before, one of the most charming of English writers, 
as he lay dying, was asked if his mind was at ease, and with 
his last breath Oliver Goldsmith owned that it was not. So 
it was with Robert Burns. His delirium dwelt on the horrors 
of a jail. He uttered curses on the tradesmen who had pur- 
sued him for debt. " What business " said he to his phy- 
sician, in a moment of consciousness, "what business has a 
physician to waste his time on me ? I am a poor pigeon not 
worth plucking. Alas ! I have not feathers enough on me to 
carry me to my grave." For a year or more his health had been 
failing. For he had a poet's body as well as a poet's mind— ner- 
vous, feverish, and impressionable ; and his constitution, which, 
if nurtured and regulated might have carried him to the limit 
of life, was undermined by the storm and stress of his disap- 
pointment and a preying mind. In the previous autumn he 
had been seized with a rheumatic attack. His digestion had 
given way. He was sinking in melancholy and gloom. In his 
last April he wrote to his friend Thomson — " By Babel's 
streams I have sat and wept almost ever since I saw you last. 
I have only known existence by the pressure of the heavy hand 
of sickness, and have counted time by the repercussions of 
pain. Rheumatism, cold, and fever have formed to me a ter- 
rible combination. I close my eyes in misery and open them 



54 

without hope." It was thought to revive him by sea-bathing, 
and he was sent to the Brow Well. There he remained for three 
weeks. He was under no delusion as to his state. " Well, 
madam." he said to Mrs. Eiddell, on arriving, " have you any 
commands for the other world ?" He sat that evening with his 
old friend and spoke manfully of his approaching death, of the 
fate of his children, and his fame, sometimes indulging in bit- 
ter-sweet pleasantry, but never losing the consciousness of his 
condition. After three weeks he wearied of the fruitless hunt 
for death, and he returned home to die. He was only just in 
time. When he reached his house on the eighteenth he could 
no longer stand. He was soon delirious ; in three days he was 
dead. On the fourth day we are told that his attendant held 
a cordial to his lips. He swallowed it greedily, raised himself 
almost wholly up, spread out his hands, sprang forward, nigh 
the whole length of the bed, fell on his face and expired. I 
suppose there are many who can read the account of these last 
months with composure. They are more fortunate than I. 
There is nothing much more melancholy in all biography. The 
brilliant poet, the delight of all society, from the highest to the 
lowest, sits brooding in silence over the drama of his spent 
life — the unseen home, the plough and the savour of fresh- 
turned earth, the silent communion with Nature and his own 
heart, the brief hours of splendour, the dark hour of anguish, 
the mad struggle for forgetfulness, the bitterness of vanished 
homage, the gnawing doubt of failure, the distressing future of 
his wife and children, the endless witch dance without clue or 
remedy— all preplexing, all soon to end while he is yet young, 
as men count youth. Though none know so well as he that 
his youth is gone, his race is run, his message is fulfilled. His 
death revived the flagging interest which had been felt in him. 
As usual, men began to realize what they had lost when it was 
too late. When it was known that he was dying, his towns- 
men had shewn great anxiety and distress. One man was heard 
to say with a touch of quaint simplicity, "Who do you think 
will be our poet now ?" The district set itself to prepare a public 
funeral for the poet who had died almost penniless among 
them ; a vast concourse followed him to his grave ; the " awk- 
ward squad," as he had foreseen and deprecated, fired a volley 
over his grave ; the streets were lined with soldiers, and among 
them one who sixteen years later was to be Prime Minister ; 
and while the procession wended its gloomy way, as if no ele- 
ment of tragedy were to be awanting to the scene, his widow's 
hour of travail arose, and she gave birth to the hapless child 
who had caused his father so much misgiving. In this place 
and on this day it all seems present to us — the house of anguish, 
the thronged churchyard, the weeping mourners. We feel our- 
selves part of the lamenting crowd ; we hear those dropping 
volleys and that muffled drum. We bow our heads as the coffin 
passes and acknowledge with tears the inevitable doom. Pass. 






55 

heavy hearse, with thy weary freight of shattered hopes and 
exhausted frame ; pass with that simple pomp of A fatherless 
bairns and sad moralising friends ; pass with the sting of death 
to the victory of the grave ; pass with the perishable and leave 
us the eternal. It is rare to be fortunate in life ; it is infinitely 
rarer to be fortunate in death. Happy in the occasion of his 
death, as Tacitus says of Agricola, is not a common epitaph. 
It is comparatively easy to know how to live, but it is beyond 
all option and choice to compass the more difficult art of know- 
ing how and when to die. We can generally, in looking back, 
choose a moment in a man's life when he had been fortunate if 
he had dropped down dead. And so the question arises natur- 
ally to-day, was Burns fortunate in his death — the death which 
we commemorate? There can, I fancy, be only one answer. 
It was well that he died when he did. It might even have been 
better for himself if he had died a little earlier. The terrible 
lines that he wrote two years earlier to Mrs. Riddell and Mr. 
Cunningham betoken a spirit mortally wounded. In those last 
two years the cloud settles never to be lifted. " My constitu- 
tion and frame," he says, " were aboriginally blasted with the 
deep incurable taint of hypochondria, which poisons my ex- 
istence." He found, perhaps, some pleasure in the composition 
of his songs, some occasional relief in the society of boon com- 
panions ; but the world was fading before him. There is an 
awful expression in Scotland, which one never hears without a 
pang — Such and such a one " is done," meaning that he is 
physically worn out. Burns was "done." He was struggling 
on like a poor wounded deer to his grave. He had often faced 
the end not unwillingly. " Can it be possible," he once wrote 
to Mrs. Dunlop, " that when I resign this frail, feverish being, 
I shall find rnyself in conscious existence ? When the last 
gasp of agony has announced that I am no more to those who 
know me and the few who love me : when the cold, unconscious 
corpse is resigned to the earth, to be the prey of reptiles and 
become a trodden clod, shall I yet be warm in life, enjoying or 
enjoyed ?" Surely that reads as if he foresaw our meeting here 
to-day and would fain be with us. And, indeed, for all we know 
he may be. Twelve years before he had faced death in a less 
morbid spirit. Why, he asked — 

Why am I loath, to leave this earthly scene? 

Have I so found it full of pleasing charms ? 
Some drops of joy, with draughts of ill between, 

Some gleams of sunshine 'mid renewing storms ! 

He had perhaps never enjoyed life so much as is generally 
supposed, though he had turned to it a brave, cheerful, un- 
flinching face ; and his last years had been years of misery. 
" God have mercy on me," he wrote, years before the end, " a 
poor, damned, uncautious, duped, unfortunate fool : the sport 
and miserable victim of rebellious pride, hypochondriac imagi- 
nation, and Bedlam passions ! " There was truth in this out- 



56 

burst; at any rate his most devoted friends — and to bean 
admirer of Burns is to be his friend — at any rate his most 
devoted friends might wish that he had not lived to write the 
letter to Mr. Clark, piteously pleading that a harmless toast 
might not be visited too hard upon him ; or that to Mrs. 
Riddell : "I write you from the regions of hell and the terrors 
of the damned : " or to be harried as a political suspect by his 
official superiors and shunned by his acquaintances for the 
same reason — walking like a ghost in Dumfries, neglected and 
ignored. "That's all over now, my young friend," he said, 
referring to the attitude towards him of Dumfries society — 
"Were not my heart light I would dee." That was in 1794. 
Had he died then it might have been happier for himself ; and 
we might have lost some parts of his life that we would rather 
forget. But posterity could not have spared him. We could 
not have spared the songs which belong to these years; and 
above all, that supreme creed which he bequeathed to the 
world — " A man's a man for a' that," woukl have remained un- 
delivered. One might, perhaps, go further and say that — 
piteous as it is — whom the gods love should die young. This 
is a hard saying, but it will not greatly affect the bills of mor- 
tality—and it applies only to poets of the first rank, while even 
here it has its exceptions, and illustrious exceptions they have 
been. But surely the best poetry is produced before middle 
age — before the morning and its illusions have faded, before 
the heaviness of noon and the baneful chill of evening. Few 
men can bear the strain of a poet's temperament through many 
years. At any rate, we may feel sure of this, that Burns had 
produced his best — that he could never again have produced a 
"Tarn o' Shanter," or a "Cottar's Saturday Night," or a 
" Jolly Beggars." And though long before his death he could 
still write lines affluent with tenderness and grace, the hand of 
pain and hate and care, to use his own words, had lain heavily 
upon him. And this leads to another point. To-day is not 
merely the melancholy anniversary of death, but the real and 
incomparable fulfilment cf prophecy. For this is the moment 
to which Burns looked forward when he said to his wife " Don't 
be afraid. I'll be more respected a hundred years after I am 
dead than I am at present." To-day the hundred years are 
completed and we can judge of the prediction. On that point 
we must all be unanimous. Burns had honor in his life-time, 
but his fame has rolled like a snow-ball since his death, and it 
rolls on yet. There is indeed no parallel to it in the world. It 
sets the calculations of compound interest at defiance. It ia 
not merely the watchword of a nation that carries and implants 
Burns worship all over the globe as birds carry seeds, but he 
has become the champion and the patron saint of democracy — 
he bears aloft the banner of the essential equality of man. His- 
birthday is celebrated a hundred and thirty-seven years after 
its occurrence more universally than that of any other human. 






57 

being. He reigns over a greater dominion than aDy empire 
that the world has ever seen. Neither does the ardor of his 
devotees decrease. Ellislaud, Mauchline and Dumfries are still 
shrines of countless pilgrims. Burns statues are a hardy annual. 
Burns clubs spring up like mushrooms after rain. The editions 
of Burns are as the sands of the sea. The production of Burns 
manuscripts was a lucrative branch of industry until it was 
checked by the untimely interference of the law. No canon- 
ized name in the calendar excites such blind and enthusiastic 
adoration. Whatever Burns may have contemplated in the 
most daring flight of his imagination, whatever dream he may 
have fondled in the wildest moments of his elation, must have 
fallen utterly short of the reality, as we know it to-day. And 
it is all spontaneous. There is no puff, no advertisement, no 
manipulation. Intellectual cosmetics of that kind are frail and 
fugitive. They rarely survive their subject — they would not 
have availed here. Nor is there any special glamor attached to 
the poet — rather the reverse. He stood by himself, he has 
grown by himself, it is himself and no other that we honor. 
But what had Burns in his mind when he made his prediction ? 
It might be whimsically urged that he was conscious that the 
world had not yet seen his master-piece, for the "Jolly Beg- 
gars " was not published until some time after his death. But 
that would not have been sufficient, for he had probably for- 
gotten its existence. Nor do I think he spoke at haphazard. 
What was probably present to his mind were the fickleness of 
his contemporaries towards him, his conviction of the essential 
excellence of his work, the consciousness that the excesses of 
his later years had unjustly obscured him, and that his true 
figure would be preserved as these fell into forgetfulness, or 
were measured by their true value. If so, he was right in his 
judgment, for his true life began with his death. With the poet 
passed all that was gross or impure ; the clear spirit stood re- 
vealed, and soared at once to its accepted place among the fixed 
stars in the firmament of the rare immortals. 
•Lord Rosebery then resumed his seat amid loud cheering. 



LORD ROSEBERY AT GLASGOW. 

At a Public Meeting in the evening in St. Andrew's Halls, Glas- 
gow, Lord Rosebery delivered t?ie followinq address. 

Ladies and Gentlemen : It is a great pleasure to find myself 
in this hall on a non-political occasion. We are here to-day to 
celebrate Burns. What the direct connection of Burns with 
Glasgow is, I am not exactly sure ; but, at any rate, I am confi- 
dent of this, that in the great metropolis of the West, there is a 
clear claim that we should celebrate the genius of Robert Burns. 
I have celebrated it already elsewhere. I cannot, perhaps, deny 
that the day has been a day of labor, but it has been a labor of 



58 

love. It is, and it must be, a source of joy and pride to us to 
see our champion Scotsman receive the honor and admiration 
aud affection of humanity ; to see, as I have seen this morning, 
the long processions b tinging homage and tribute to the con- 
quering dead. But these have only been signs and symptoms 
of the world-wide passion of reverence and devotion. That 
generous and immortal soul pervades the universe to-day. In 
the humming city and in the crowd of man ; in the backwood 
and in the swamp ; where the sentinel paces the bleak frontier, 
aud where the sailor smokes his evening pipe ; and, above all, 
where the farmer and his men pursue their summer toil, whether 
under the Stars aud Stripes or under the Union Jack — the 
thought and sympathy of men are directed to Robert Burns. 
I have sometimes asked myself if a roll-call of fame were read 
over at the beginning of every century, how many men of emi- 
nence would answer a second time to their names. But of our 
poet there is no doubt or question. The " adsum " of Burns 
rings out clear and unchallenged. There are few before him 
on the list, and we cannot now conceive a list without him. 
He towers high, and yet he lived in an age when the average 
was sublime. It sometimes seems to me as if the whole eigh- 
teenth century was a constant preparation for, a constant work- 
ing up to, the great drama of the revolution which closed it. 
The scenery is all complete when the time arrives — the dark, 
volcanic country ; the hungry, desperate people ; the fire-fly 
nobles ; the concentrated splendour of the court ; in the 
midst, in her place as heroine, the dazzling Queen. And dur- 
ing long previous years, brooding nature has been producing 
not merely the immediate actors, but figures worthy of the 
scene. What a glittering procession it is ! We can only mark 
some of the principal figures. Burke leads the way by se- 
niority ; then come Fox and Goethe ; Nelson and Mozart ; 
Schiller, Pitt, and Burns ; Wellington and Napoleon. And 
among these Titans, Burns is a conspicuous figure ; the figure 
which appeals most of all to the imagination and affection of 
mankind. Napoleon perhaps looms larger to the imagination, 
but on the affection he has no hold. It is in the combination of 
the two powers that Burns is supreme. What is his secret? 
We are always discussing him and endeavouring to find it out. 
Perhaps, like the latent virtue of some medical baths, it may 
never be satisfactorily explained. But, at any rate, let us dis- 
cuss him again. That is, I presume, our object to-night. What 
pleasanter or more familiar occupation can there be for Scots- 
men ? But the Scotsmen who enjoy it have generally perhaps 
more time than I. Pardon then the imperfections of my 
speech, for I speak of a subject which no man can altogether 
compass, and which a busy man has perhaps no right to at- 
tempt. The clue to Burns's extraordinary hold on mankind is 
possibly a complicated one ; it has, perhaps, many develop- 
ments. If so, we have not time to consider it to-night. But 



59 

I personally believe the causes are, like most great causes, 
simple ; though it might take long to point out all the ways in 
which they operate. The secret, as it seems to me, lies in two 
words — inspiration and sympathy. But, if I wished to prove 
my contention, I should go on quoting from his poems all 
night, and his admirers would still declare that I had omitted 
the best passages. I know that profuse quotation is a familiar 
form of a Burns speech, but I am afraid to begin lest I should 
not end, and I am sure I should not satisfy. I must proceed, 
then, in a more summary way. Now, ladies and gentlemen, 
there seems to me to be two great natural forces in British lit- 
erature — I use the safe adjective of British. I use it partly be- 
cause hardly any of Burns's poetry is strictly English, partly 
because he hated and was, perhaps, the first to protest against 
the use of the word English as including Scottish — well, I say, 
there are in that literature two great forces of which the power 
seems sheer inspiration and nothing else — I mean Shakespeare 
and Burns. This is not the place or the time to speak of that 
miracle called Shakespeare, but one must say a word of the 
miracle called Burns. Try and reconstruct Burns as he was. 
A peasant, born in a cottage that no sanitary inspector in these 
days would tolerate for a moment— struggling with desperate 
effort against pauperism aim ost in vain ; snatching at scraps 
of learning in the intervals of toil, as it were with his teeth; 
a heavy, silent lad, proud of his ploughing. All of a sudden, 
without preface or warning, he breaks out into exquisite song 
like a nightingale from the brushwood, and continues singing 
as sweetly, with nightingale pauses, till he dies. A nightin- 
gale sings because he cannot help it; he can only sing exquis- 
itely because he knows no other. So it was with Burns. What 
is this but inspiration ? One can no more measure or reason 
about it than measure or reason about Niagara. And remem- 
ber, ladies and gentlemen, the poetry is only a fragment of 
Burns. Amazing as it may seem, all contemporary testimony 
is unanimous that the man was far more wonderful than his 
works. "It will be the misfortune of Burns' reputation, ' r 
writes an accomplished lady, who might well have judged him 
harshly, " in the records of literature, not only to future gen- 
erations and to foreign countries, but even with his native 
Scotland and a number of his contemporaries, that he has been 
regarded as a poet and nothing but a poet. * * * Poetry," 
she continues, " (I appeal to all who had the advantage of be- 
ing personally acquainted with him) was actually not his forte. 
* * * None, certainly, ever outshone Burns in the charms 
— the sorcery I would almost call it— of fascinating conversa- 
tion, the spontaneous eloquence of social argument, or the un- 
studied poignancy of brilliant repartee." And she goes on to- 
describe the almost superhuman fascination of his voice and of 
h's eyes, those balls of black fire which electrified all on whom 
they rested. It seems strange to be told that it would be an 



60 

injustice to judge Burns by his poetry alone; but as to the 
magnetism of his presence and convei'sation there is only one 
verdict. "No man's conversation ever carried me so com- 
pletely off my feet," said the Duchess of Gordon — the friend 
of Pitt aud of the London wits, the queen of Scottish society. 
Dugald Stewart says that "all the faculties of Burns' mind 
were, so far as I could judge, equally vigorous, and his predi- 
lection for poetry was rather the result of his own enthusiastic 
and impassioned temper, than of a genius exclusively adapted 
to that species of composition. From his conversation I should 
have pronounced him to be fitted to excel in whatever walk of 
ambition he had chosen to exert his abilities." And of his 
prose compositions the same severe judge speaks thus : " Their 
great and varied excellencies render some of them scarcely 
less objects of wonder than his poetical performances.-" The 
late Dr. Robertson used to say that, "considering his educa- 
tion, the former seemed to him the more remarkable of the 
two." " I think Burns," said Principal Robertson to a friend, 
"was one of the most extraordinary men I ever met with. 
His poetry surprised me very much, his prose surprised me 
still more, and his conversation surprised me more than both 
his poetry and prose." We are told, too, that "he felt a 
strong call towards oratory, and all who heard him speak—and 
some of them were excellent judges— admitted his wonderful 
quickuess of apprehension and readiness of eloquence." All this 
seems to me marvellous. It surely ratifies the claim of inspi- 
ration without the necessity of quoting a line of his poetry. 
I pass then to his sympathy. If his talents were universal his 
sympathy was not less so. His tenderness was not a mere sel- 
fish tenderness for his own family, for he loved all mankind 
except the cruel and the base. Nay, we may go further and 
say that he placed all creation, especially the suffering and 
despised part of it, under his protection. The oppressor in 
every shape, even in the comparatively innocent embodiment 
of the factor and the sportsman, he regarded with direct and 
personal hostility. But above all he saw the charm of the home ; 
he recognized it as the basis of all society, he honored it in 
its humblest form, for he knew, as few know, how unpreten- 
tiously, but how sincerely, the family in the cottage is welded 
by mutual love and esteem. " I recollect once," said Dugald 
Stewart, speaking of Burns, " he told me, when I was admir- 
ing a distant prospect in one of our morning walks, that the sight 
of so many smoking cottages gave a pleasure to his mind which 
none could understand, who had not witnessed, like himself, 
the happiness and worth which they contained." He dwells 
repeatedly on the primary sacredness of the home and the 
family, the responsibility of fatherhood and marriage. " Have 
I not," he once wrote to Lord Mar, " a more precious stake in 
my country's welfare than the richest dukedom in it ? I have 
a large family of children and the prospect of many more." 



61 

The lines in which he tells his faith are not less memorable 
than the stately stanzas in which Gray sings the "short and 
simple annals of the poor." I must quote them again, often 
quoted as they are : 

To mak' a happy fireside clime 

To weans and wife, 
That's the true pathos and sublime 

C f human life. 

His verses then go straight to the heart of every home ; they ap- 
peal to every father and mother. But that is only the begin- 
ning, perhaps the foundation, of his sympathy. There is some- 
thing for everybody in Burns. He has a heart even for vermin ; 
he has pity even for the arch-enemy of mankind. And his uni- 
versality makes his poems a treasure-house in which all may 
find what they want. Every wayfarer in the journey of life 
may pluck strength and courage from it as he passes. The 
sore, the weary, the wounded, will all find something to heal 
and soothe. For this great master is the universal Samaritan. 
Where the priest and the Levite may have passed by in vain, 
this eternal heart will still afford a resource. But he is not only 
for the sick in spirit. The friend, the lover, the patriot, will 
all find their choicest refreshment in Burns. His touch is every- 
where, and it is everywhere the touch of genius. Nothing 
comes amiss to him. What was said of the debating power of 
his eminent contemporary, Dundas, may be said of his poetry — 
" He went out in all weathers." And it may be added that all 
weathers suited him ; that he always brought something prec- 
ious, something we cherish, something that cannot die. He is, 
then, I think, the universal friend in an unique sense. But he 
was, poetically speaking, the special friend of Scotland, in a 
sense which recalls a profound remark of another eminent 
Scotsman, I mean Fletcher of Saltoun. In an account of a 
conversation between Lord Cromarty, Sir Edward Seymour, and 
Sir Christopher Musgrave, Fletcher writes : 4 ' I said I knew a 
very wise man, so much of Sir Christopher's sentiment, that 
he believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he 
need not care who should make the laws of a nation." This 
may be rudely paraphrased, that it is more important to make 
the songs of a nation than to frame its laws, and this again may 
be interpreted that in former days, at any rate in the days of 
Fletcher, even to the days of Burns, it is the familiar songs of 
a, people that mould their thoughts, their manners, and their 
morals. If this be true can we exaggerate the debt that we Scots- 
men owe to Burns? He has bequeathed to his country the most 
exquisite casket of songs in the world — primarily to his country, 
but others cannot be denied their share. I will give only one ex- 
ample, but that is a signal one. From distant Roumauia the 
Queen of that country wrote to Dumfries to-day — that she has 
no copy of Burns with her, but that she knows his songs by 
heart. We must remember that there is more than this to be 



62 

said. Many of Burns' songs were already in existence in the 
lips and minds of the people — rough and coarse and obscene. 
Our benefactor takes them, and with a touch of inspired 
alchemy transmutes them and leaves them pure gold. He 
loved the old catches and the old tunes and into these gracious 
moulds he poured his exquisite gifts of thought and expression. 
But for him those aucientairs, often wedded to words which no 
decent man could recite, would have perished from that cor- 
ruption if not from neglect. He rescued them for us by his 
sougs, and in doing so he hallowed the life and sweetened 
the breath of Scotland. I have also used the words patriot 
and lover. These draw me to different lines of thought. 
The word " patriot " leads me to the political side of Bums. 
There is no doubt he was suspected of being a politician— and he 
is even said to have sometimes wished to enter Parliament. That 
was perhaps an excusable aberration, and my old friend Pro- 
fessor Masson has, I think, surmised that had he lived he might 
have been a great Liberal pressman. My frail thought shall 
not dally with such surmise, but it conducts us naturally to 
the subject of Burns's politics. From his sympathy for his 
own class, from his indignation against nobles like the Duke 
of Queensberry, and from the toasts that cost him so dear, it 
might be considered easy to infer his political opinions. But 
Burns should not be claimed for any party. A poet, be it re- 
membered, is never a politician, and a politician is never a 
poet — that is to say, that a politician is never so fortunate as 
to be a poet, and a poet is so fortunate as never to be a poli- 
tician. I do not say that the line of demarcation is never 
passed — a politician may have risen for a moment, or a poet 
may have descended, but where there is any confusion between 
the two callings, it is generally because the poet thiuks he dis- 
cerns, or the politician thinks he needs, somethiDg higher than 
politics. Burns's politics were entirely governed by the imag- 
ination. He was at once a Jacobite and a Jacobin. He had 
the sad sympathy which most of us have felt for the hapless 
house of Stuart, without the least wish to be governed by it. 
He had much the same sort of abstract sympathy with the 
French Revolution, when it was setting all Europe to lights ; 
but he was prepared to lay down his life to prevent its putting 
this island to rights. And then came his official superiors of 
the Excise, who, notwithstanding Mr. Pitt's admiration of his 
poetry, snuffed out his politics without remorse. The name of 
Pitt leads me to add that Burns had some sort of relation with 
three prime ministers. Colonel Jenkinson of the Cinque Ports 
Feucihle Cavalry — afterwards minister for fifteen years under 
the title of Liverpool — was on duty at Burns's funeral, though 
we are told — the good man — that he disapproved of the poet, 
and declined to make his acquaintance. Pitt, again, passed on 
Burns one of his rare and competent literary judgments, so 
eulogistic, indeed, that one wonders that a powerful minister 



63 

could have allowed one whom he admired so much to exist on 
an exciseman's pay when well, and an exciseman's half pay 
when dying. And from Addington, another prime minister, 
Burns elicited a sonnet, which, in the Academy of Lagado, 
would surely have been held a signal triumph of the art of ex- 
tracting sunshine from cucumbers. So much for politics in 
the party sense. "A man's a man for a' that" is not politics, 
it is the assertion of the rights of humanity in a sense far 
wider than politics. It erects all mankind, it is the charter of 
its self-respect. It binds, it heals, it revives, it invigorates : it 
sets the bruised and broken on their legs, it refreshes the 
stricken soul, it is the salve and tonic of character: it cannot 
be narrowed into politics. Burns's politics are indeed nothing 
but the occasional overflow of his human sympathy into past 
history and current events. And now, having discussed the 
two trains of thought suggested by the words "friend" and 
*' patriot," I come to the more dangerous word " lover." There 
is an eternal controversy which, it appears, no didactic oil will 
ever assuage, as to Burns's private life and morality. Some 
maintain that these have nothing to do with his poems ; some 
maintain that his life must be read into his works, and here 
again some think that his life damns his poems, while others 
aver that his poems cannot be fully appreciated without his 
life. Another school thinks that his vices have been exag- 
gerated, while their opponents scarcely think such exaggera- 
tion possible. It is impossible to avoid taking a side. I walk 
on the ashes knowing the fire beneath, and unable to avoid 
them, for the topic is inevitable. I must confess myself, then, 
one of those who think that the life of Burns doubles the 
interest of his poems, and I doubt whether the failings of his 
life have been much exaggerated, for contemporary testimony 
on that point is strong, though a high and excellent authority, 
Mr. Wallace, has recently taken the other side with much 
power and point. But the life of Burns which I love to read 
with his poems, does not consist in his vices ; they lie outside 
it. It is a life of work, and truth , and tenderness. And though, 
like all lives, it has its light and shade, remember that we 
know it all, the worst as well as the best. His was a soul 
bathed in crystal ; he hurried to avow everything. There 
was no reticence in him. The only obscure passage in 
his life is the love passage with Highland Mary, and as to 
that he was silent not from shame, but because it was a 
sealed and sacred episode. " What a flattering idea," he once 
wrote, "is a world to come! There shall I with speechless 
agony of rapture again recognize my lost, my ever dear Mary ! 
whose bosom was fraught with truth, honour, constancy and 
love." But he had, as the French say, the defects of his 
qualities. His imagination was a supreme and celestal gift. 
But his imagination often led him wrong, and never more 
than with women. The chivalry that made Don Quixote see 
the heroic in all the common events of life made Burns (as his 



64 

"brother tells us) see a goddess in every girl that he approached. 
Hence many love affairs, and some guilty ones ; but even these 
must be judged with reference to time and circumstance. 
This much it is certain, had he been devoid of genius they 
would not have attracted attention. It is Burns's pedestal 
that affords a target. And why, one may ask, is not the same 
measure meted out to Burns as to others ? The illegitimate 
children of great captains and statesmen and princes are treated 
as historical and ornamental incidents. They strut the scene 
of Shakespeare, and ruff it with the best. It is for the illegiti- 
mate children of Burns, though he and his wife cherished 
them as if born in wedlock, that the vials of wrath are re- 
served. Take two brilliant figures, both descended from 
Stuarts, who were alive during Burns's life. We occupy our- 
selves endlessly and severely with the offences of Burns. We 
heave an elegant sigh over the kindred lapses of Charles 
James Fox and Charles Edward Stuart. Again, it is quite clear 
that, though exceptionally sober in his earlier years, he drank 
too much in later life. But this, it must be remembered, was 
but an occasional condescendence to the vice and habit of the 
age. The gentry who pressed him to their houses, and who 
were all convivial, have much to answer for. His admirers 
who thronged to see him, and who could only conveniently sit 
with him in a tavern, are also responsible for this habit, so 
perilously attractive to men of genius. From the decorous 
Addison, and the brilliant Boliugbroke onward, the eighteenth 
century records hard drinking as the common incident of in- 
tellectual eminence. To a man who had shone supreme in the 
most glowing society, and who was now an exciseman in a 
country town, with a home that cannot have been very exhila- 
rating, and with a nervous system highly strung, the tempta- 
tion of the warm tavern, and the admiring circle there, may 
have almost been irresistible. Some attempt to say that his in- 
temperance was exaggerated. I neither affirm nor deny. It 
was not as a sot he drank ; that no one insinuated ; if he suc- 
cumbed it was to good fellowship. Remember, I do not seek 
to palliate or excuse, and, indeed, none will be turned to dis- 
sipation by Burns's example ; he paid too dearly for it. But 
I will say this, that it all seems infinitely little, infinitely re- 
mote. Why do we strain, at this distance, to discern this dim 
spot on the poet's mantle ? Shakespeare and Ben Johnson 
took their cool tankard at the Mermaid ; we cannot afford, in 
the strictest view of literary responsibility, to quarrel with them 
for that. When we consider Pitt and Goethe we do not con- 
centrate our vision on Pitt's bottles of port or Goethe's bottles 
of Moselle. Then why, we ask, is there such a chasm between 
the Mermaid and the Globe, and why are the vintages of Wim- 
bledon and Weimar so much more innocent than the simple 
punch bowl of Inveraray marble and its contents? I should 
like to go a step further and affirm that we have something to 
be grateful for even in the weakness of men like Burns. Man- 
kind is helped in its progress almost as much by the study of 



65 

imperfection as by the contemplation of perfection. Had we 
nothing before U8 in our futile and halting lives but saints and 
the ideal, we might well fail altogether. We grope blindly 
along the catacombs of the world, we climb the dark ladder of 
life, we feel our way to futurity, but we can scarcely see an 
inch around or before us. We stumble and falter and fall, 
our hands and knees are bruised sore, and we look up for light 
and guidance. Could we see nothing but distant, unapproach- 
able impeccability, we might well sink prostrate in the hope- 
lessness of emulation and the weariness of despair. Is it not 
then, when all seems blank and lightless and lifeless, when 
strength and courage flag, and when perfection seems as re- 
mote as a star, is it not then that imperfection helps us? 
When we see that the greatest and choicest images of God 
liave had their weaknesses like ours, their temptations, their 
hour of darkness, their bloody sweat, are we not encouraged 
by their lapses and catastrophes to find energy for one more 
effort, one more struggle ? Where they failed we feel it a less 
dishonour to fail ; their errors and sorrows make, as it were, 
an easier ascent from infinite imperfection to infinite perfec- 
tion. Man after all is not ripened by virtue alone. Were it 
so this world were a paradise of angels. No ! Like the growth 
of the earth, he is the fruit of all the seasons ; the accident of 
a thousand accidents, a living mystery moving through the 
seen to the unseen. He is sown in dishonor ; he is matured 
under all the varieties of heat and cold ; in mist and wrath, in 
snow and vapours, in the melancholy of autumn, in the torpor 
of winter, as well as in the rapture and fragrance of summer, 
or the balmy affluence of the spring — its breath, its sunshine, 
its dew. And at the end he is reaped — the product, not of one 
climate, but of all; not of good alone, but of evil ; not of joy 
alone, but of sorrow — perhaps mellowed and ripened, perhaps 
stricken and withered and sour. How, then, shall we judge 
anyone? How, at any rate, shall we judge a giant — great in 
gifts and great in temptation ; great in strength and great in 
weakness ? Let us glory in his strength and be comforted in 
his weakness. And, when we thank heaven for the inestimable 
gift of Burns, we do not need to remember wherein he was 
imperfect, we cannot bring ourselves to regret that he was 
made of the same clay as ourselves. 

No one was better fitted than Lord Kosebery to 
give voice to the universal feeliDg of Scotland, and 
the addresses here reprinted which he gave at Dum- 
fries and Glasgow must be, and are, acknowledged by 
all to have been in every way worthy of the time and 
the theme. In them Lord Rosebery reached the 
summit of his oratorical career and added another to 
the many reasons for the place he has gained as the 
most popular Scotsman of his day. 



66 



( Extract from The Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings.) 
LETTER OF THE HON. E. R. HOAR. 

Concord, May 8, 1882. 

My Dear Dr. Ellis : I find that it will be out of my power 
to attend the meeting of the Historical Society on Thursday 
next, and I am sorry to lose the opportunity of hearing the 
tributes which its members will pay to the memory of Mr. 
Emerson, than whose name none more worthy of honor is 
found on its roll. His place in literature, as poet, philosopher, 
seer, and thinker, will find much more adequate statement 
than any which I could offer. But there are two things which 
the proceedings of our society may appropriately record con- 
cerning him, one of them likely to be lost sight of in the lustre 
of his later and more famous achievements, and the other of a 
quality so evanescent as to be preserved only by contemporary 
evidence and tradition. 

The first relates to his address in September, 1835, at the 
celebration of the two hundredth annivetsary of the settle- 
ment of Concord, which seems to me to contain the most com- 
plete and exquisite picture of the origin, history, and peculiar 
characteristics of a New England town that has ever been pro- 
duced. 

The second is his poioer as an orator, rare and peculiar, and 
in its way unequalled among other contemporaries. Many of 
us can recall instances of it, and there are several prominent in 
my recollection ; but perhaps the most striking was his address 
at the Burns centennial, in Boston, on the 25th of January, 
1859. 

The company that he addressed was a queer mixture. First, 
there were the Burns club ; grave, critical, and longheaded 
Scotchmen, jealous of the fame of their countryman, and 
doubtful of the capacity to appreciate him in men of other 
blood. There were the scholars and poets of Boston and its 
neighborhood, and professors and undergraduates from Har- 
vard College. Then there were State and city officials, alder- 
men and common councilmen, brokers and bank directors, 
ministers and deacons, lawyers, and "carnal self-seekers" of 
every grade. 

I have had the good fortune to hear many of the chief 
orators of our time, among them Henry Clay, John Quincy 
Adams, Ogden Hqffman, S. S. Prentiss, William H. Seward, 
Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, George William Curtis, some 
of the great preachers, and Webster, Everett, Choate, and 
Winthrop at their best. But I never witnessed such an effect 
of speech upon men as Mr. Emerson apparently then attained. 
It reached at once to his own definition of eloquence — " a tak- 



67 

ing sovereign possession of the audience." He had uttered 
but a few sentences before he seemed to have welded together 
the whole mass of discordant material and lifted them to the 
same height of sympathy and passion. He excited them to 
smiles, to tears, to the wildest enthusiasm. His tribute to 
Burns is beautiful to read, perhaps the best which the occasion 
produced on either side of the ocean. But the clear articula- 
tion, the ringing emphasis, the musical modulation of tone 
and voice, the loftiness of bearing, and the radiance of his face, 
all made a part of the consummate charm. When he closed 
the company could hardly tolerate any other speaker, though 
good ones were to follow. 

I am confident that every one who was present on that even- 
ing would agree with me as to the splendor of that eloquence. 

Very truly yours, 

E. R. Hoae. 

Rev. Geobge E. Ellis, D. D., 

Vice-President of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 



SPEECH BY MR. RALPH WALDO EMERSON AT 
THE BURNS CENTENARY, BOSTON, 1859. 

Mb. President and Gentlemen: I do not know by what 
untoward accident it has chanced — and I forbear to inquire — 
that, in this accomplished circle, it should fall to me, the worst 
Scotsman of all, to receive your commands, and at the latest 
hour, too, to respond to the sentiment just offered, and which 
indeed makes the occasion. But I am told there is no appeal, 
and I must trust to the inspiration of the theme to make a fit- 
ness which does not otherwise exist. 

Yet, sir, I heartily feel the singular claims of the occasion. 
At the first announcement, from I know not whence, that the 
25th of January was the hundredth anniversary of the birth of 
Kobert Burns, a sudden consent warmed the great English 
race, in all its kingdoms, colonies, and states, all over the 
world, to keep the festival. 

We are here to hold our parliament with love and poesy, as 
men were wont to do in the middle ages. Those famous par- 
liaments might or might not have had more stateliness, and 
better singers than we— though that is yet to be known — but 
they could not have better reason. 

I can only explain this singular unanimity in a race which 
rarely acts together, but rather after their watchword, each for 
himself — by the fact that Robert Burns, the poet of the mid- 
dle class, lepresents in the mind of men to-day that great upris- 
ing of the middle class against the armed and privileged minori- 
ties — that uprising which worked politically in the American 
and French Revolutions, and which, not in governments so 
much as in education and in social order, has changed the face 
of the world. 

In order for this destiny, his birth, breeding, and fortune 
were low. His organic sentiment was absolute independence, 
and resting, as it should, on a life of labor. No man existed 
who could look down on him. They that looked into his eyes 
saw that they might look down the sky as easily. His muse 
and teaching was common sense, joyful, aggressive, irresisti- 
ble. 

Not Latimer, not Luther, struck more telling blows against 
false theology than did this brave singer. The "Confession 
of Augsburg," the " Declaration of Independence," the French 
" Rightsof Man," and the " Marseillaise " are not more weighty 
documents in the history of freedom than the songs of Burns. 
His satire has lost none of its edge. His musical arrows yet 
sing through the air. 

He is so substantially a reformer, that I find his grand plain 
sense in close chain with the greatest masters — Rabelais, 
Shakespeare in comedy, Cervantes, Butler, and Burns. If I 
should add another name, I find it only in a living countryman 
of Burns. He is an exceptional genius. The people who care 
nothing for literature and poetry care for Burns. It was in- 



69 

different — they thought who saw him — whether he wrote verse 
or not ; he could have done anything else as well. 

Yet how true a poet is he ! And the poet, too, of poor men, 
of hodden-gray, and the Guernsey coat, and the blouse. He 
has given voice to all the experiences of common life ; he has 
endeared the farm-house and cottage, patches and poverty, 
beans and barley ; ale, the poor man's wine ; hardship, the 
fear of debt, the dear society of weans and wife, of brothers 
and sisters, proud of each other, knowing so few, and finding 
amends for want and obscurity in books and thought. What 
a love of nature ! and, shall I say it, of middle class nature. 
Not great, like Goethe, in the stars, or like Byron on the ocean, 
or Moore in the luxurious East, but in the homely landscape 
which the poor see around them — bleak leagues of pasture and 
stubble, ice, and sleet, and rain, and snow-choked brooks ; 
birds, hares, field-mice, thistles, and heather, which he daily 
knew. How many "Bonny Doons," and " John Anderson my 
joes," and "Auld Lang Synes," all around the earth, have his 
verses been applied to ! And his love songs still woo and melt 
the youths and maids ; the farm work, the country holiday, 
the fishing cobble, are still his debtors to-day. 

And, as he was thus the poet of the poor, anxious, cheerful, 
working humanity, so had he the language of low life. He 
grew up in a rural district, speaking a patois unintelligible to 
all but natives, and he has made that Lowland Scotch a Doric 
dialect of fame. It is the only example in history of a lan- 
guage made classic by the genius of a sirigle man. But more 
than this. He had that secret of genius to draw from the 
"bottom of society the strength of its speech, and astonish the 
ears of the polite with these artless words, better than art, and 
filtered of all offence through his beauty. It seemed odious to 
Luther that the devil should have all the best tunes ; he would 
bring them into the churches ; and Burns knew how to take 
from fairs and gypsies, blacksmiths and drovers, the speech of 
the market and street, and clothe it with melody. 

But I am detaining you too long. The memory of Burns— 
I am afraid heaven and earth have taken too good care of it, 
to leave us anything to say. The west winds are murmuring 
it. Open the windows behind you, and hearken for the in- 
coming tide, what the waves say of it. The doves perching 
always on the eaves of the Stone Chapel opposite, may know 
something about it. Every name in broad Scotland keeps his 
fame bright. The memory of Burns — every man's and boy's, 
and girl's head carries snatches of his songs, and can say them 
by heart, and, what is strangest of all, never learned them 
from a book, but from mouth to mouth. The wind whispers 
them, the birds whistle them, the corn, barley, and bulrushes 
hoarsely rustle them ; nay, the music-boxes at Geneva are 
framed and toothed to play them ; the hand-organs of the 
Savoyards in all cities repeat them, and the chimes of bells 
ring them in the spires. They are the property and the solace 
of mankind. 



70 



ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE BURNS ME- 
MORIAL ASSOCIATION, AT BOSTON, MASSA- 
CHUSETTS, THURSDAY EVENING, MARCH 28, 
1901, BY HON. GEORGE F. HOAR. 

You would not have bidden me here to-night, at any rate 
you would not have«done well to bid me here to-night if you 
had thought I should try to say much that is original. Robert 
Burns is perhaps the best known character in history or liter- 
ature. If we do not say, as Emerson did, that the pigeons on 
the eaves of King's Chapel know something about him, yet 
certainly there is no man, woman or child where the Scotch 
or the English tongue is spoken, the round world over, to 
whom the tones of Burns do not seem familiar as his mother's 
voice. When Scotsmen meet on his birthday they meet as 
children meet at a Thanksgiving table, only to recall old mem- 
ories, to think again old thoughts, and to utter common words. 
If I have no title to speak of Burns as a Scotsman to Scots- 
men, I have at least the touch of that nature which, whenever 
men are thinking of him, makes the whole world kin. 

There is no doubt that Robei't Burns is the hero of Scotland. 
Wherever on the face of the earth there is a Scotsman, and 
they are everywhere on the face of the earth, that name 
will quicken his pulse as no other will even if it be the Bruce 
or, Wallace or Walter Scott. 

Now surely it is no slight thing to be the hero cf the Scots- 
man's heart. The Scottish is one of the great races. I do not 
know that it has or ever has had a superior. Wherever you 
find a Scotsman, whether on land or sea, whether in peace or 
in battle, whether in business or on the farm, in public life or 
in family life, on the frontier or in the crowded city, whether 
governing subject races in the East or a freeman among free- 
men in republican liberty, whether governing empires or man- 
aging great business institutions, sometimes harder to govern 
than empires, thinking or acting, discoursing of metaphysics 
or theology or law or science, writing prose or writing poetry, 
there you may hope to find a born leader of men sitting on 
the foremost seat and, whatever may be the undertaking, 
conducting it to success. 

We Yankees do not undervalue ourselves. We lay claim 
also to the quality I have just described. I think that I, a 
born New Englander, esteem the New England character even 
more highly than do most New Englanders. I like to believe 
that these two peoples resemble each other in mental quality, 
as their rocky mountains and their rocky shores are like each 
other, and as, in general, they have had iu common the same 
stern Calvinistic faith. I never feel more at home than when 
I am reading the novels of the great magician or the collections 



71 

of Scotch humor by Dean Rainsay. Dominie Sampson must 
have been the grandfather of Parson Wilbur. Baillie Nicol 
Jarvie was surely born in old Concord. The Scotch Elder 
and the New England Deacon are twin brothers. Both are 
good men, Godward, and if sometimes " a little twistical man- 
ward," it is much more rarely than is commonly supposed. If 
either of them love to get money, he knows how to give it 
away. If the Scotchmen, like their Yankee cousins, think it a 
shame to live poor if they can honestly help it, they have 
-at least given one noble example of a man who thinks it a dis- 
grace to die rich. What a great English writer says of the 
Scotch would answer for the New England Puritan and Revo- 
lutionary Fathers. "Every Scotsman," says Charles Reade, 
" is an iceberg with a volcano underneath. Thaw the 
Scotch ice and you will come to the Scotch fire." 

So Robert Burns, sprung of a great race, will always have 
at least two great races for his loving audience. 

He was fortunate also in a fit parentage for a great manhood 
■and a great poet. His mother knew by heart the ancient ly- 
rics, many of them never written or printed, of the moun- 
tain and the moor. They were the cradle hymns of the child. 
His father was a Scotch Puritan. Upon the plain gray stone 
in the churchyard at Ayr the poet carved the undying lines .- 

" Oye whose cheek the tear of pity stains, 

Draw near with pious rev'rence, and attend : 
Here lie the loving husband's dear remains 
The tender father, and the generous friend ; 

" The pitying heart that felt for human woe ; 

The dauntless heart that feared no human pride ; 
The friend of man— to vice alone a foe ; 
For ev'n his failings lean'd to virtue's side." 

This epitaph has one fault. The poet has borrowed for it one 
of the best lines of one of the greatest English poets. Surely 
no other man ever lived of whom it could be said in criticism 
that instead of taking a line from Goldsmith, he might have 
given us a better one of his own. 

Now what was this man whose fame circles the earth like a 
parallel of latitude, whose words are known by heart to count- 
less millions of men and are to be known by heart, as we be- 
lieve, to countless generations? He was the child of two peas- 
ants, native of a bleak northern clime. He was born in a clay 
•cottage roofed with straw, which his father had built with his 
own hands. Just after he was born, part of the dwelling gave 
way in a storm, and mother and child were carried at midnight 
to a neighbor's house for shelter. He got a little teaching 
from his father at night, by the light of the solitary cottage 
•candle, and a little at a Parish school. But Carlyle tells us 
that poverty sunk his whole family below the level even of 
their cheap school system. He was born and bred in poverty 
in a sense in which poverty has always been unknown in New 



72 

England. Among our ancestors the hardships of the humblest 
life were but like the hardships of camping out of a hunting 
party or an army on a difficult march serving only to stimulate 
and strengthen the rugged moral nature. It was like practis 
ing in a gymnasium. The man came out of them cheerful 
and brave, with a quality fitted for the loftiest employment. 
Campbell tells us Burns was the eldest of a family buffeting 
with misfortunes, toiling beyond their strength and living 
without the support of animal food. At thirteen he threshed 
in the barn, and at fifteen was the principal laborer on the 
farm. Wearied with the toils of the day, he sank in the even 
ing into dejection of spirits and dull headaches, the joint re- 
sult of anxiety, low diet and fatigue. He saw his father broken 
by age and misfortunes approaching to that period when, to use 
the words of the son, "he escaped a prison only by sinking 
into the grave." 

This kind of life — " the cheerless gloom of a hermit and the 
toil of a galley slave brought him to his sixteenth year, when 
love made him a poet." His first love, it is said, was his fel 
low reaper in the same harvest field. He has given an im- 
mortality to all his humble goddesses that no royal champion 
ever gave to high-born beauty. His Mary still looks down 
from heaven on all lovers. The star that rose on the anniver- 
sary of her death has received a new splendor from his muse. 
No Italian sky, no Arcadian landscape ever smiled with— 

** a gleam, 
A light that never was on sea or land, 
The consecration and the poet's dream," 

like that which his genius has spread over the scene where the 
two young lovers met to pass a single clay. 

Walter Scott tells us that Burns looked forward, the grea 
part of his life, to ending his days as a licensed beggar, like 
Andrew Gemmels or Edie Ochiltree. Yet this man brought to 
the world the best message ever brought to the world since 
Bethlehem, of love and hope and reverence for God and man. 
Humanity the round world over walks more erect for what 
Kobert Burns said and sung. The meanest flower that grows 
has an added beauty and an added fragrance because of the 
song of Burns. The humblest task to which man can turn his 
hand has an added dignity because of him. The peasant loves 
his wife, and the mother loves her child, the son loves his 
father better because of the living words in which Burns has 
clothed the undying affections of the human heart. He has 
taught us as no other man has taught us, as was never taught 
us outside of the Holy Scriptures, the beauty and the glory of 
the worship of the soul to its Creator. The whole secret of 
Scottish history, the whole secret of New England history, is 
told in the Cotter's Saturday Night: 



: 







JEAN ARMOUR BURNS BROWN, 

GRANDDAUGHTER OF ROBERT BURNS' OLDEST SON. 



73 

The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face, 

They round the ingle form a circle wide ; 
The sire turns o'er wi' patriarchal grace, 

The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride ; 
His bonnet reverently is laid aside, 

His lyart haffets wearing thin an' bare ; 
Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide, 

He wales a portion with judicious care ; 
And, " Let us worship God ! " he says with solemn air 

Then, kneeling down, to heaven's Eternal King, 

The saint, the father, and the husband prays ; 
Hope " springs exultiDg on triumphant wing " 

That thus they all shall meet in future days ; 
There ever bask in uncreated rays, 

No more to sigh or shed the bitter tear ; 
Together hymning their Creator's praise, 

In such society, yet still more dear ; 
While circling time moves round in an eternal sphere. 

Compared with this, how poor Religion's pride, 

In all the pomp of method and of art, 
When men display to congregations wide 

Devotion's every grace, except the heart ! 
The Power, incensed, the pageant will desert, 

The pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole ; 
But happ'y in some cottage far apart, 

May hear, well pleased, the language of the soul, 
And in his book of life the inmates poor enroll. 

" From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs." 

From scenes like these New England's grandeur springs. 
The spirit of the Scotch Covenanter and the New England 
Puritan, the spirit that breathed in the prayer that rose from 
■clay cottage, and from mossy hillside, which make — 

" In fair Virtue's heavenly road, 

The cottage leave the palace far behind ; 

the spirit which consoled Wallace on the scaffold and encoun- 
tered Edward at Bannockburn — we, too, know something 
about it. It crossed the sea with our Fathers. It landed with 
them at Plymouth and Salem. It stood, that April morning, 
on the green at Lexington, and at the bridge at Concord. It 
drove sir William Howe, with his regiments and ships out of 
Boston. It captured Burgoyne at Saratoga. It sustained 
Washington at Valley Forge. It triumphed with Washington 
at Yorktown. It abolished slavery. It saved the Union. It 
triumphed again at Appomattox. It was the spirit of God- 
fearing, law-abiding Liberty, loving home, dying if need be 
for country. Certainly New England may claim the right to 
stand by Scotland when she honors the memory of Burns. 

No race or nation will ever be great, or will long maintain 
greatness, unless it hold fast to the faith in a living God, in a 
beneficent Providence, and in a personal immortality. To 
man as to nation every gift of noblest origin is breathed 
upon by this hope's perpetual breath. I am not here to make 
an argument. I only affirm a fact. Where this faith lives are 



74 

found Courage, Manhood, Power. When this faith dies, 
Courage, Manhood and Power die with it. 

No poet can be great, whatever his genius, unless he have in 
his native language a fit instrument. But few languages have 
ever been spoken among men, so far as we know, in which the 
genius of a poet would not have found itself hampered and 
fast bound, as the soul of Shakespere would have found itself 
constrained and dwarfed in the body of a brute. The lyre of 
the minstrel must be musical in tone. There are the Greek 
and the Latin and the Italian and the Spanish and the English. 
Among these languages the Lowland Scotch is without a su- 
perior, if not without a rival, for the utterance of what Rob- 
ert Burns had to say to mankind. There was never language 
spoken under Heaven among men fitter vehicle of the tender- 
est pathos, of the loftiest poetic emotion, of the pithiest wit or 
wisdom, of the most exquisite humor than the Lowland Scotch. 
David might have written his Psalms in it and Solomon his 
Proverbs, and iEsop his fables, and Cervantes his immortal 
story, aud Franklin his sage and homely counsel. If any man 
doubt what I say, let him get The Psalms frae Hebrew intil 
Scottis, by P. Hatley Waddell, LL. D., Minister, and read- 
how King David might have spoken if he had been inspired 
to speak for Scotsmen and not for Jews. 

Before we come to what we may call the quality of the soul 
of Burns, let me speak of one or two gifts with which nature 
endowed him which were* essential to his greatness as a poet. 
He had the gift of tunefulness. He said the things he had to 
say so that you hum them like a tune. It is not enough tbat 
a sentiment be noble and true, that it be witty or wise, to 
move the heart and stir the pulse. It must be rhythmic in ex- 
pression. This explains why it is that translations are seldom 
worth anything. You may translate the thought into another 
tongue. But you cannot translate the music. Throughout all 
nature the soul needs this influence of rhythm, if it is to be 
powerfully moved. The ship above the water is doubled in 
rhyme by the shadow below — the rhythm of oar-stroke with 
oar-stroke, the cadence of the incoming tide, the reflection of 
star-lit sky in star-lit lake— this secret of rhythm, what it is, 
why it so penetrates and subdues the soul, nobody knows. 
Substitute for one word in a line of " Lycidas " or in the "Cot- 
ter's Saturday Night" another that means precisely the same 
thing to the intellect, and the poetry is all gone. The genius 
of Scotland sings through the soul of Burns like the wind 
through an iEolian harp. His thoughts seem to come to us on 
the wings of melodies prepared for them from the foundation 
of the world. 

Burns had the gift of humor. A famous English wit said it 
would take a surgical instrument to get a joke into the head 
of a Scotchman ; to which a famous Frenchman well answered : 
"True, an English joke." Certainly Sidney Smith must have 



75 

been joking himself when he denied the sense of humor to the 
nation that produced Burns, Walter Scott, John Brown, John 
Wilson and Dean Ramsay. I, myself, know many delightful, 
wise and witty Englishmen. I know well the contribution 
which the English race, to which I belong, has made to humor, 
from Chaucer, the morning star of poetry ; through Shakespere 
down to Sidney Smith himself. But for all that, these stars 
dwell apart. I am afraid the rays of their humor do not shine 
for their countrymen in general. If there be one man rather 
than another who cannot take a joke, and iuto whose serious 
and solemn conception of things not the slightest humor ever 
enters, it is the average Englishman. 

There is a book in two volumes by a Mr. Adams, entitled 
" Wrecked Lives." He includes Robert Burns in his list. We 
all know the sorrow and the sin and the remorse with which 
the life of this peasant boy — and he was always a boy — was 
so full. But for all that I think most of us would have liked 
to be on that wreck. Do not be too sure, my sanctimonious 
friend, that the life of Robert Burns was a sad one. God 
gave him of His choicest blessings. He gave him humor, that 
most delightful solace and comfort ever given to man, as a 
great humorist has said, "to enliven the days of his pilgrim- 
age and to charm his pained footsteps over the burning 
marie." With it He gave him what He always gives with it, a 
tender and pitying heart, where dwelt together like twin 
springs the fountain of laughter and the fountain of tears. 
Burns had a humor that could make fun of Satan himself, and 
a kindly humanity that could pity him. God gave him the 
love of common things, the love of flowers and of birds, the 
love of home, and the love of father and mother and woman 
and child, the love of country, and above all a country worth 
his love. God gave him the company of his own thoughts. 
Did the poems that have brought such good cheer to all hu- 
manity bring no cheer to their author ? Do you think that 
when those immortal children were born there was no lofty 
joy of fatherhood ? If ever poet knew the heart of poet, 
Wordsworth knew the heart of Burns. It was no figure of 
sorrow or despair that appeared to that sure and divine 
vision, but the figure of one — 

in glory and in joy 
Following his plow upon the mountain side. 

If to man of woman born was ever given, not one, but a 
thousand glorious hours of crowded life, each worth an age 
without a name, they were given to him. " Scots wha hae 
wi' Wallace bled" was composed by Burns on horseback in 
the night in a terrible storm when he was drenched to the 
skin. With what days of toil, with what nights of sleepless- 
ness, with what hunger and thirst, with what scorn of men and 
women, with what nakedness and rags would you or I buy 
the immortal ecstasy of that ride in the storm when " Scots 



76 



wha hae " burst upon his intellectual vision ? The peasant 
was in good company that night when the Bruce rode behind 
the horseman. With what travail*md toil would we buy the 
privilege for a week or a day or an hour to think the thoughts 
of Burns ? Do you think that there was no rapture, that 
there was no sweet consolation and comfort when the light 
of the star that shone over Mary's grave burst upon him in 
the silence of his prayers, as the planets break out upon the 
twilight ? 

1 suppose this plowman of ours had many a carouse which 
left its unhappy trace upon brain and body. But on that night 
of more than royal fun when the hours — 

" like bees laden with pleasure " 

flew by Tarn O'Shanter, Burns was with him. There was no 
headache or heartache in the cup. When glorious Tarn, 
through the window of Alloway's auld haunted kirk, saw the 
young witch, clad in little more than nature had given her, 
take her first lesson in that immortal dancing school, and called 
out " Weel done, cutty sark," Robin was peeping too. Per- 
haps it is all vain imagination. But I cannot help thinking 
that on that occasion at least the carnal mind comprehended 
the things that be of the spirit. 

He was a noble lover, and he was a noble hater ; and like 
that of all noble haters his hatred was born always of love. He 
loved God. He loved Scotland. He loved Scotsmen and 
Scotswomen, who made Scotland. He loved flowers and hills. 
He loved justice and he loved liberty. He loved humanity. 
He hated, and only hated, the things that were enemies of these. 
He hated self-righteousness. He hated arrogance. He hated 
pride of wealth and of rank. He hated cruelty. He hated 
tyranny. Self-righteousness, bigotry, cruelty, tyranny, the 
pride of rank and the pride of wealth, were the besetting sins 
not only of Scotland but of mankind at large in his day. They 
are not the besetting sins of Scotland or of mankind at large 
to-day ; and that they are not is due to few men on this planet 
in larger degree than to Burns. He brought from heaven to 
man the message of the dignity of humanity, of brotherly love 
and justice and pity for sorrow and for sin. And while we la- 
ment as Burns lamented what was sorrowful and what was sin- 
ful in his own life, yet the very fact that his life had in it so 
much of poverty and of sorrow and of sin fitted him all the 
more to deliver that message to mankind, gave a new power to 
the lash with which he scourged pride and self-righteousness 
and bigotry and tyranny, and disposed men to harken and to 
give heed to that message which, perhaps, no other man could 
have so perfectly delivered. He spoke to poor men in the right 
of a man who was poor. He spoke to sinners in the right of a 
man who had sinned. He spoke to freemen in the right of a 
man who was free. From every line of Burns seems to come 






77 

the old lesson — What God hath cleansed, that call not thou 
common. 

Not even the love of country for a moment quenched in the 
heart of Burns the still holier emotion — the love of Liberty. 
He was filled with the spirit of another great Scotsman, 
Fletcher of Saltoun, who said: "I would die to serve Scot- 
land ; but I would not do a base act to save her." He would 
never stand by even his own country in a wrong. He knew that 
the purest love of country is that which values her honor 
above her glory or her life. That most abominable and per- 
nicious sentiment, " Our Country, right or wrong," found no 
home in his bosom. When the administration of Great Brit- 
ain plunged his country into a war against what he thought 
the just rights of another people, he gave as a toast : " May 
our success in the present war be equal to the justice of our 
cause." When somebody proposed the health of Pitt, I think 
then the Prime Minister, he gave this : " Here is to the health 
of a better man, George Washington." Just after our Revolu- 
tion he wrote an ode for General Washington's birthday, of 
which the first stanza is : 

No Spartan tube, no Attic shell, 

No lyre iEolian I awake, 
'Tis Liberty's bold note I swell ; 

Thy harp, Columbia, let me take ! 
See gathering thousands, while I sing 
A broken chain, exulting bring 
And dash it in a tyrant's face, 

And dare him to his very beard. 

And tell him he no more is feared, 
No more the despot of Columbia's race ! 
A tyrant's proudest insults braved. 
They shout a People freed ! They hail an Empire saved. 

What has he not done for Scotland ? I suppose that ro- 
mantic story which Walter Scott tells so admirably in the 
Tales of a Grandfather— a book which should be in the hands of 
every ingenuous boy — the story of Wallace and the Bruce and 
Randolph and the good Lord James of Douglas, of Bannock- 
burn, of Montrose, of Argyle, of Claverhouse, of Fifteen and 
of Forty-five, the genius of Campbell, of Allan Ramsay and 
Dr. John Brown would have made their way into the knowl- 
edge and, even without Burns or Scott, the heart of mankind. 
Yet, but for Burns, and one other, we should have known 
Scotland but as we know Wales or Denmark or Norway. I 
should be disloyal to the greatest single benefactor of my boy- 
hood if I did' not claim for Walter Scott a share in this 
achievement. 

Aye me ! Aye me ! It is lang syne. It is threescore years 
and ten ago, almost, since I used to kneel with a book by a 
chair— I was not big enough for a table— to drink in with mouth 
and eyes wide open those wondrous stories in the Tales of a 
Grandfather— they did not let little boys read novels in those 
days— of Sterling Brig and the gallant exploits of Wallace and 



78 

his treacherous betrayal when Menteith turned the loaf, and 
his dauntless beariug at the trial, and his tragic death ; of Ran- 
dolph and the good Lord James of Douglas, who loved better 
to hear the lark sing than the mouse squeak ; of the Bruce and 
his landing on the shore of Garrick ; and the story of the 
spider that failed six times to swing himself to the beam, six 
times, and got there the seventh, which led King Robert in his 
cabin to remember that he had been beaten six times too, and 
might succeed the seventh, as the spider did ; and the taking 
of Edinburg Castle by scaling the precipice ; and the getting 
Douglas Castle back three times from the English ; and Ban- 
nockburn, where the Scottish Army knelt in prayer and King 
Edward thought they were asking forgiveness ; and the strik- 
ing down of the English Knight Sir Henry De Bohun on the 
evening before the battle ; and the death of Douglas in Spain ; 
and his pilgrimage with the Bruce's heart, when the Spanish 
warriors wondered that so brave a warrior had no scar on his 
face, and he told them he thanked God that he had always en- 
abled his hands to keep his face ; and the casting of the Bruce's 
heart in its silver case into the Moorish ranks. "Pass thou 
first, thou dauntless heart, as thou wert wont of yore, and 
Douglas will follow thee or die " ; and the finding the bones of 
Bruce five hundred years after, in a marble tomb in the church 
at Dunfermline ; and the great concourse of people — " and as 
the church would not hold the numbers, they were allowed to 
pass through it one after another, that each one, the poorest 
•&* well as the richest, might see all that remained of the great 
King Robert who restored the Scottish Monarchy. Many 
people shed tears ! for there was the wasted scull which 
once wae the head that thought so wisely and boldly for his 
country's deliverance ; and there was the dry bone which had 
once been the sturdy arm that killed Sir Henry De Bohun be- 
tween the two armies, at a single blow, on the evening before 
the battle of Bannockburn " ; and then afterward the story of 
the six Jameses and of the beautiful Mary and the fatal flight 
into England, and the scaffold at Fotheringay. Then later still, 
though yet a boy, I read the stories of Bothwell Brig and 
of Claverhouse— I was perfectly impartial between Cavalier and 
Roundhead — and of John, Duke of Argyle, who when Queen 
Caroline told him she would make a hunting ground of Scot- 
land, answered : In that case, Madam, I must go down and get 
my hounds ready ! " and of the death of Montrose on the 
scaffold who " climbed the lofty ladder as 'twere the path to 
Heaven." 

These two immortal spirits, Scott f nd Burns, made this ob- 
scure country, smaller than an average American State, another 
Greece, and made of its capital another Athens, revealed to the 
world its romantic history, taught men the quality of its peo- 
ple, and associated their own names with every hill and rock 
and river and glen. They dwell forever in a mighty compan- 
ionship, the eternal and presiding genii of the place. 






79 

Their spirits wrap the dusky mountain ; 
Their memories sparkle o'er the fountain ; 
The meanest rill, the mightiest river, 
Rolls mingling with their names forever. 

The message Burns brought to mankind was something more 
than a message of liberty or democracy, or the equality of man 
in political rights. Those doctrines were rife already. Locke 
and Algernon Sidney and the men of the great Rebellion 
and the English Revolution had preached them. Our Fathers 
•of the Revolution had given to the world their incomparable 
State papers. Samuel Adams and Jefferson had surrounded 
these doctrines with an impregnable fortress when Burns was 
an unknown plowboy. The theoretical doctrines of liberty 
were held by the great Whig Houses in England and Scotland. 
Russell and Sidney and Hampden had died for them. They 
were preached by men who would have regarded the contact 
of a peasant's garment with their own as contamination. Our 
own Revolutionary leaders had a high sense of personal dig- 
nity. The differences of rank, though not based on birth, 
were perfectly understood and rigorously enforced among 
them. But Burns revealed to mankind the dignity of hu- 
mility. His heart went out to the poor peasant because of 
his poverty. He never doffed his bonnet in reverence to any 
man because of his accidents. He never seems to have had a 
taste for grandeur, whether physical or social. He was born 
and dwelt for a great part of his life in Ayr, on the seashore. 
His daily walk was in sight of that magnificent ocean view, 
fit to be compared, according to those who know them both, 
to the Bay of Naples itself. And yet he has not, so far as I 
now remember, left a line which indicates that he was moved 
by the grandeur and glory of the sea. The great sublimities 
which Homer and Milton and Shakespere picture and inter- 
pret to us were not for him. 

The sublime objects of art or nature, " the cloud-rapt towers, 
the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples," the everlasting sea, 
the mountain summits, the splendor of courts, the pride, pomp, 
and circumstances of glorious war, did not stir him to poetical 
utterance. The field mouse whose nest his furrow had laid 
bare, the daisy his plow had torn up by the roots, the cottage, 
the country ale-house, the humble thistle spreading wide 
among the bearded bear, the peasant and the peasant girl, the 
weans by the mother's knee, were the things dear to him. 
These were his inspirations. The strength of weakness, the 
wealth of poverty, the glory of humility are what he came into 
the world to teach mankind. 

I cannot explain it. I do not know that I can describe it. I 
cannot reason about it. But I think you know what I mean 
when I say that we do not think of Burns as belonging to litera- 
ture, but only as belonging to nature. I do not care about find- 
ing him in books of specimens of poets, or in collections of 
poets, or on the rows of bookshelves. He belongs somehow to 



80 

simple nature. I should rather almost be tempted to put his 
picture and include him in Bewick or Audubon among the song 
birds. You might almost expect a mocking-bird or a vesper 
sparrow, or a bobolink, or a hermit thrush to sing his music. 
Since he was born into the world you can hardly think of the 
world, certainly the world for the Scotsman, existing without 
him. You expect for him an eternity like that of nature her- 
self. While the morning and the evening rejoice, while the 
brook murmurs, while the grass grows and water runs, while 
the lark sings and the bobolink carols and the daisy blossoms 
and the rose is fragrant, while the lily holds up its ivory chalice 
in the July morning, while the cardinal flower hangs out its red 
banner in August, while the heather blooms in Scotland or the 
barberry bush adorns the posture in New England, so long the 
songs of Burns shall forever dwell in the soul, " nestling," as 
Lowell says, "nestling in the ear because of their music, and 
in the heart because of their meaning." 






81 



THE 143d ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF 
ROBERT BURNS WAS APPROPRIATELY CELE- 
BRATED AT FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH. 

The celebration was held under the auspices of the Jean 
Armour Burns Club of this city. The edifice was crowded with 
the poet's admirers to the number of eight hundred. 

Mr. William R. Smith, President of the Club, said: 

After an interregnum of over twenty years, I find myself 
again occupying the president's chair of the Washington Burns 
Club. The old familiar faces no longer greet me ; there are 
only a few left to tell the tale of our success in getting the 
great meetings to listen to the words spoken by those whom 
the nation delighted to honor her highest positions. Our mar- 
tyred President Garfield's great speech has become a classic. 
Senator Frye, still honored with "supreme command" in the 
Senate, is living to testify as to the intelligent audiences of the 
more than 400 that drank in his words of wisdom. His speech 
brings a premium at the book stalls, necessitating its being 
reprinted, which this Club under its new name proposes to do, 
adding the essay of Mr. Andrew Carnegie from that great and 
rare book, " Liber Scriptorum," by special permission. Lord 
Kosebery's two great speeches, that of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
and last, but not least, the address delivered in Tremont Temple 
by Hon. George F. Hoar, in March, 1901. These speeches, es- 
says, and addresses are all calculated to help people to think 
aright about Robert Burns. 

This Club, by changing its name to the " Jean Armour Burns 
Club," means to honor the devoted, loving wife, the kind, con- 
siderate mother of his children, the widow who honored his 
memory for thirty-eight years in a most acceptable manner. 
Ladies being members of the Club give a refinement to its pro- 
ceedings not easily attainable by any other inspiring agency. 
To teach people to think aright about Burns is no easy task ; it 
is time, we think, to drop the everlasting twaddle about his 
mistakes ; let us look for, study, and try to appreciate his gran- 
deur in all its various aspects. 

Dean Stanley, one of the truly great men of the last century, 
in his lectures on the Scottish church, says: " Burns was the 
prodigal son of the Church of Scotland, but he was still her 
genuine offspring. I have already spoken of ' The Cotter's 
Saturday Night,' but this was not all. He who could pen the 
keen sarcasms of ' Holy Willie's Prayer,' and the address to 
the 'Unco Guid,' which pierce through the hollow cant and 
narrow pretensions of every church in Christendom, with a 
sword too trenchant, but hardly too severe, showed that he had 
not lived in vain in the atmosphere of the philosophic clergy 
and laity of the last century, whose kind and genial spirit saved 



82 

him from being driven by the extravagant pretensions of the 
popular Scottish religion into absolute unbelief." 

Mr. Andrew Carnegie, in a speech in Dumfries, October 14, 
1899, says : "Burns has become part of the national life of 
Scotland, and must endure as long. Scotland would not be 
Scotland, nor would her sons be what they are, if he had not 
appeared. Eliminate from us what that genius has influenced, 
stimulated, and nourished within us from childhood up, in our 
individual characters, and we cease to be Scotch. It is start- 
ling to think that we must say of one man that we cannot be 
truly national unless there be within us growth from the seed 
which he sowed ; yet it is true, such the power of genius in its 
highest development. For another reason Burns occupies and 
will permanently hold his unique position in other lands than 
his own, for supreme genius rules over the highest natures of 
all lands. Its touch makes the whole world kin." 

As long ago as 1844, Christopher North said: "Burns is 
among the highest order of human beings who have benefited 
their race by the expression of noble sentiments and glorious 
thoughts ; has he not elevated honest rusticity, lightened the 
burden of care, aided to reconcile poverty to its lot, advanced 
the dignity of labor, placed a crown on the head of an honest 
man ' tho' e'er so poor,' and proclaimed him ' king o' man for 
a' that?"' 

When visiting Scotland, after many years' absence, I had the 
good fortune to meet Mr. Craibe Angus, the great Burns bibli- 
ographer and collector — since passed to the unknown land, 
regretted by all who had the honor of his acquaintance. An 
extract from the introduction of his book (which he presented 
to me the 18th of August, 1899) will better describe the thor- 
ough Burns student he was than anything I could say about 
him: "Whatever be the reason for the larger circulation of 
Burns, the fact remains that he is more electrical, more up to 
date, more in the heart of the English-speaking people than 
any other poet. It is not in the name of Shakespeare, intel- 
lectually supreme though he be, or Milton, or Goldsmith, that 
English, Irish, and Scotch pledge friendship to each other in 
foreign lands. No ; on such occasions the inspiration is Barns, 
and the alternating themes, 'A Man's a Man ' and 'Auld Lang 
Syne.' Racial and traditional differences are forgotten when 
hand clasps hand and voice joins voice in rendering that 
most magical of anthems, 'Auld Lang Syne.' The works, in 
a word, that have the largest circulation among white men, are 
the Psalms of David and the songs of Burns, the Sermon on 
the Mount and the ' Cotter's Saturday Night.' " Craibe Angus' 
great work, to be published in future, will be of immense value 
in teaching people to think aright about the poet Burns. 

Former Gov. Knott, of Kentucky, in a speech to the Wash- 
ington Burns Club in 1876, concluded with this: "Mankind 
will never consent that Burns shall be monopolized by a single 






83 

nation. Humanity loves and claims him ; vast as would be the 
chasm in the literature of his country, if the glorious offspring 
of his genius was stricken from it, vaster still would be the void 
in the universal heart of man if the wide space filled by the 
memory of Burns would be empty ; a memory which will grow 
brighter until time itself shall wax old as doth a garment, and 
the heavens be rolled together as a scroll. 

In introducing Mr. Henderson, Mr. Smith said it was a 
great pleasure to present a Scotchman who had reached the 
highest obtainable political position in this country, to speak 
for, in his opinion, the greatest Scotchman who ever lived. 

Speaker Henderson's appearance on the rostrum was the sig- 
nal for a most gratifying demonstration. 



REMARKS OF SPEAKER HENDERSON BEFORE 
THE JEAN ARMOUR BURNS CLUB. 

I do not know how you all felt, but do you know I had a 
Trind of devouring feeling for Mrs. Latey when she sang those 
two beautiful Scotch songs, "On the Bonnie, Bonnie Banks 
of Loch Lomond," and " Coming Thro' the Bye." It all re- 
minded me of my trip to Scotland last summer, which, after a 
lapse of many, many years — yes, I say many years, because I 
do not intend to be too specific about my age [laughter] — I 
found myself, like our worthy President, Mr. Smith, back in 
Scotland, in the land of my birth, and away up in the High- 
lands I heard sang there this sweet song of "Loch Lomond." 
And as the strains stole sweetly over that beautiful lake how 
it stirred the very blood in one's veins ; how thrilling it was to 
look upon the face of that grand old mountain, Ben Lomond, 
and to hear the sweet song of the bonnie lassie, in our midst, 
twirling the notes of that sweet song of Loch Lomond. [Ap- 
plause.] 

But I received a tremendous shock here this evening. It 
all happened when I saw our worthy President addressing a 
lady, with what I thought was a little more ardour on Mr. 
Smith's part than he should exercise for one of his years. 
[ Laughter.] I stepped forward, of course, to study him, and 
learned that the lady was the descendant of one of the worthiest 
and brainiest men that ever held a seat in Congress. Turning to 
me, this lady wanted to know if I were going to talk about 
Burns this evening. I told her I was. " O," she said, " what 
more can there be said about Burns ? " This was quite a shock, 
and as I had made no preparation for my talk the task was a 
hard one, and this shock made it still harder, and I thought 
about suggesting an adjournment to our worthy President. 
[Laughter.] But I want to tell that good lady that there is 
much to be said about Burns. I want to say to that lady that 
in connection with the life of Burns there is a story for father 



84 

and mother, for the young and for the old. Do the dear things 
in life ever grow old ? Are there no more tributes to be paid 
to the sainted father, and to that one person unequalled in 
earth, the mother ? Suns and moons will come and go, and 
yet the story of the mother will be fresh, and new loves, new 
worships, and new kisses, will be bestowed upon that sainted 
person. Is the story of love worn out ? Will not the story of 
love be told again and again while humanity lives on earth, and 
will it not ever be the same fresh, pure, thrilling story? Cer- 
tainly we are not tired of hearing of the one great character 
of our native land — the land of our forefathers ? No, my friends, 
you cannot go to-day to Edinburgh, or other cities and towns 
in Scotland, and see the monuments erected by our ancestors 
to the people's poet without feeling one's blood take fire with 
enthusiastic admiration. 

Last summer while I was in Edinburgh the Lord Provost 
gave me a beautiful dinner, and I related at that dinner an 
event which occurred in our family upon the departure of my 
father and his family from Scotland. When my father left 
Scotland, together with mother and his brood of little chil- 
dren, all desired to visit old Holyrood. The sentinel who 
stood there then — and one stands there now — would not per- 
mit us to enter, because we were dressed as peasants. We had 
on " store clothes," so to speak, but my father wore a suit of 
corduroy, which in those days was called, I think, " mole-skin."' 
[Laughter.] My brother and sister were allowed to pass the 
sentinel, but when along came my father with his ruddy, hon- 
est face, but also in corduroys, the bayonet was put down be- 
fore him and he was told he could not enter Holyrood with 
those clothes on. My brother hearing the trouble said, " if 
Father can't go in then none of us will go in," and not one of 
the Henderson family entered old Holyrood that day. But fifty- 
five years thereafter his youngest child revisiting the land of 
his birth found that the King had sent an order before him 
directing that he be shown through every part of Holyrood. 
[Applause.] I related this incident at that dinner, and before 
that assembled body of leading men and lovely women who 
were entertaining me at Edinbui-gh last summer tears were 
my response, and how I wished that dear, old Tom Henderson 
could have been there to see what a change fifty-five years had 
wrought in his native land. For, although his ancestors had 
shed their blood in Scotland's cause on many a field, because 
he wore a corduroy suit he was not allowed to enter Holyrood, 
while, to-day, the humblest peasant can enter there, in the 
land where Burns sang his immortal songs, contributing poten- 
tially to the great change. So, my dear lady friend, something 
yet may be said about Burns, and although I had no prepared 
speech the lady's remark gave me a text for one, with these 
heads : 

I will speak of Burns as a Preacher, a Teacher, a Liberator, 



85 

a Philosopher, and a Poet, and that is all my speech. [Laugh- 
ter.] I start out with the bold declaration that Robert Burns 
was a great man, a great preacher. The small man don't need 
centuries to tell the world what he amounts to, and you can 
size the small mau up quickly. But it can be truly said of the 
great man that "he is not without honor save in his own coun- 
try." True, it may take years and even ages to tell the world 
he was great. Great men are as simple as the daisies you tread 
upon, and one of the attributes of greatness is simplicity. 
Greatness springs up amongst us as the wild rose, and while 
we feel its very presence we cannot possibly describe it. So it 
was with Burns. While he lived he was not fully appreciated. 
He was not fully appreciated in his own day and generation, 
and I can even remember when a copy of Burns was not al- 
lowed in the Henderson family. The character of Burns was 
not appreciated by the church, and if my friend, the Rev. 
Dr. MacLeod, had lived in those days, in the days of Burns, 
he would have had some doubts about the character of Robert 
Burns. It is different now, Doctor, because you have a dif- 
ferent laity to deal with. You deal with a different class ; 
you deal with a class of thinkers, with those who use their 
brains and who reason, a class who will talk about your 
sermons and who will reason about them. But my dear 
old father lived to see the poems of Robert Burns read 
almost daily in his family, and by him, too, almost as often as 
his own family Bible. My father lived to discover that Burns 
was a great man, and I say he was a great preacher. You can- 
not always select the pulpit for the preacher. Take my own 
case as an example. [Laughter.] Now, I was educated by my 
mother for the ministry; brought up for it, and I remember 
when often coming home from some hard campaigns in Iowa 
my dear old mother would come to me and in a soft voice 
would say : "David, if I could only see you in the pulpit ; if I 
could only see you a minister?" "But," I would say in reply 
to her, " my dear mother, I am a preacher. The only trouble 
is that you cannot see and understand my pulpit." Robert 
Burns was also a preacher, a preacher to humanity, and I tell 
you my friends that if this old earth of ours had more such 
preachers in its pulpits, it would be a better world. [Ap- 
plause.] Yes, but some say Burns drank. In regard to this I 
want to present to you two witnesses on this subject of drink- 
ing. You can understand from what I have already said about 
Father Henderson that he would make no unjust charges which 
would hurt either the church or the clergy or the pulpit, and 
yet from him I learned (not, however, until I grew to man- 
hood, for he would not let me into the secret while a youth) 
that there was scarcely a minister who ever ascended the pulpit 
in Scotland who did not beforehand take something both strong 
and good. [Laughter.] And upon inquiry among the old men 
of Scotland last summer they sustained the facts of this story. 



86 



So you see it after all depends upon the point of sight from 
which you view the pulpit, especially when you want to do jus 
tice to your neighbor in a matter of this kind. But let me call 
another witness — one who has just passed to the sacred beyond, 
and one whom I met last summer for the first and last time in 
Skibo Castle, and who was the uncle of Mr. Carnegie — Mr. 
George Lauder. Talking about Burns one day, Mr. Lauder 
said: " He was a comparatively temperate man, attacked by a 
drunken lot of would-be aristocrats, who slighted him because 
he had fallen in with the politics of the young Republic of the 
United States." And the nephew of Mr. Lauder, Mr. Andrew 
Carnegie, said of Mr. Lauder: "He stood on the very picket 
line of the army of progress." I wish you all could have known 
Mr. George Lauder; a great stalwart man, refusing to bend 
under the weight of 87 years ; gentle, noble, loving, intellec- 
tual. Oliver Goldsmith drew his picture when he wrote : 

" As some tall cliff that lifts its awful form, 
Swells from the vale, and midway leaves the storm. 
Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread. 
Eternal sunshine settles on its head." 

That witness, ladies and gentlemen, is, in my judgment, a 
sufficient defense of Robert Burns' character. It is true he dis- 
turbed some of the good people of his age by his "Address to 
the Unco Guid," and also by his merciless analysis of hypocrisy 
in his " Holy Willie's Prayer." But in doing this he was tear- 
ing the mask of hypocrisy from the face of cant and supersti- 
tion. He sang in unwavering tones the song of Liberty of 
Conscience. He sounded the truth and lifted up the human 
soul. 

I also said he was a teacher. How many among us when we 
were students have longed for good teachers, especially among 
the poets and writers. I have had many teachers among that 
class ; sweet teachers, teachers that I loved and reverenced, but 
not one of them aroused the desire for study and investigation 
in my young breast as did the Poet Burns. He was my great- 
est teacher. He stirred up the mind. He gave life to his 
poems. He awakened the desire for knowledge. He made a 
man strive for the best. He taught the people to think for 
themselves, and I want to tell you that the close student of 
Burns has a better working education than he who has dug 
out, in a sort of artificial way, a sheepskin from either Oxford, 
Yale or Harvard. 

I also referred to Burns as a liberator. Of course, most of 
you will get the idea of a liberator when you think of Wilber- 
force, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, and the other good 
men who ran the underground railway during the dark days of 
this Republic. But whether he strikes the shack'es from either 
human limb or human soul, such a man is indeed a liberator, 
and such a man was Burns. You know that next to my mother 
he made me a lover of human liberty. He gave me the idea, 



:>m 

as- 



87 

and where do you suppose I got it ? I got it from one of his 
poems in which he says : 

" Why was an independent wish 
E'er planted in my mind?" 

I think this poem of Burns, — " Man was Made to Mourn," — 
the greatest, perhaps, of all his poems, and I will give you one 
verse of it : 

'* If I'm designed yon lordling's slave — 
By nature's law designed — 
Why was an independent wish 

E'er planted in my mind ? 
If not, why am I subject to 

His cruelty, or scorn ? 
Or why has man the will and pow'r 
To make his fellow mourn?" 

That was the poem which inspired me. Tbat is the poem 
which, if placed alongside of every kingly throne on earth 
would prove a battering-ram, a fire-brand and a torch for hu- 
man liberty. " If I'm designed yon lordling's slave." If 
God made me to be trampled upon, why have I the desire to 
be uufettered and free? O, my friends, take home wilh you 
the lessons of this great liberator. There is all the philosophy 
of free government in that simple little poem, and in it the 
Scottish Bard wrote the Magna Charta of human liberty. 

I also said that Burns was a philosopher and a poet. But 
why waste time in attempting to prove this, because I regard 
Burns as the most versatile poet that ever lived. Of course, I 
know I may be putting this in the superlative degree, especi- 
ally when I remember listening to Mr. Bayard Taylor, when he 
said the world had only produced four great poets, namely, 
Tasso, Homer, Shakespeare and Schiller. That was quite a 
surprise to me. Tasso was a great poet, and he touches the 
heart strings, but deals almost wholly with war. Tasso appeals 
to the liberator. He rings all the changes on the religious 
heart and shows up the passions in his great epic of "Jerusa- 
lem Delivered." But after you have read that, what more is 
there to be said about his versatility ? No doubt Homer was 
well named by Mr. Taylor, but after you have read all of those 
heroic and bloody adventures there is very little in the Homeric 
story. He even sports with death, murder, plunder, and shows 
a picture of love, and may undoubtedly be said to dispute with 
Burns the palm for versatility, and rises to the very summit of 
imaginative poetry. Still, he cannot bring himself down to 
the simple and make you a worshipper of the little flower and 
the fleeing mouse like Burns did, in which he takes you through 
the valleys and over the lakes, and you worship the simplest 
things of the earth. Then, if you are a lover, take his " High- 
land.Mary," as a poem to reach the heart. In fact, there is no 
key in the human heart which has not been touched by the 
poetic hand of Robert Burns. The soldier has been strength- 
ened by him for liberty's battle. Burns is loved and sung by 



88 



all the fraternal organizations of the earth. Some say he could 
have been poet-laureate, and I thought I would call upon Mr. 
Smith to verify that statement, although I hardly think Burns 
could have been prevailed upon to accept such, because he was 
too true to the people and loved the lowly. He believed in 
giving the poor man a chance to make something and then to 
enable him to defend that something. 

But there was one thing that I was struck with while in Scot- 
land, and that was the Edinburgh monument to Sir Walter Scott. 
I have not the power to describe it, with its fountains, and its 
beautiful ornamentation. When I got to Glasgow there was 
another fine monument devoted to Scott, and nearby a simple 
structure erected to Burns. This is the situation in Scotland 
generally. This was too much for me and I ventured to ask a 
Scotchman how it was that there was such a vast difference be- 
tween the monuments to Burns and those to Sir Walter Scott. 
" I canna tell you, Mr. Henderson," he replied. " Well," I 
said, " I have made up my mind about it. Sir Walter Scott was 
knighted, he was attached to the nobility, and the pockets of 
the rich opened abundantly to build monuments to one of their 
class ; while the monuments to Burns were erected through 
the contributions of the hard-working people among his 
countrymen." And that was finally admitted to have been the 
key to it. Sir Walter Scott, indeed, was a great novelist and a 
fair poet. I have read his " Lady of the Lake " at eampfires 
and upon other occasions until I knew it by heart, but my ad- 
miration for him, I admit, is not as great now as it was before 
I visited Scotland, saw Loch Kathrin, Ellen's Isle and the 
other places he describes in that poem. They did not come 
up to my expectation in my visit to my native land. But let 
me tell you that Kobert Burns will some day have a monument 
erected to his memory here in Washington [Applause], That 
grand little Scotchman, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, who stands to- 
day unparalleled in noble generosity, and equalled by none in 
past ages, has said to us : " Burns must have a monument in 
the City of Washington." This is one of the improvements I 
expect to live to see in Washington. But, my friends, that 
will not be Kobert Burns' great monument. His monument 
already rises from the noble, liberty-loving hearts of all lands, 
in all the world. 

Senator Edward W. Carmack, of Tennessee, who was to have 
addressed the Club, sent a letter of regret. 

President Smith then said : Permit me to introduce the pas- 
tor of this church to speak of the religious character of Robert 
Burns and his excellent wife. 

Dr. MacLeod then spoke as follows : 



Id 

[r. 



89 



SPEECH OF THE REV. DONALD C. MacLEOD,D. D., 
BEFORE THE JEAN ARMOUR BURNS CLUB. 

A prominent politician was once riding on a train when an 
Irish lady carrying a basket laden with heavy bundles took a 
seat immediately in front of him. When the conductor came 
round to secure the fares, he collected from the Irish woman, 
but passed by the politician without noticing him. Astonished 
she turned to her neighbor and inquired: "An how is it the 
conductor takes money from me, a poor Oirish lady, and takes 
none from ye that sames to be rich ?" The politician (who was 
travelling on a pass) replied : "lam travelling on my good 
looks." She looked at him for a moment, and retorted: 
" iShure thin ye maist be nearin' the ind of your journey." If 
we can judge from the large and cultured audience present 
here this evening, the *' Jean Armour Burus Club " is notnear- 
ing the end of its journey, but rather standing upon the thresh- 
old of a new era of unexampled prosperity. In all the history 
of the world there has been no time when woman's rights were 
so seriously considered and zealously guarded as to-day. This 
is the golden age in woman's history. The wealth and tender- 
ness of sentiment awakened by the names of mother, wife, and 
sister, has led us to reflect upon a name that ought to be pecu- 
liarly precious to every admirer of Burns, and to the memory 
of which the past generations have not done the amplest jus- 
tice. Our Club in its reorganization would continue as in the 
past to discharge its obligations to Robert Burns. Moreover, 
we would make amends for the shortcomings of the past. We 
would do our part in giving to the world a proper estimate of 
the life and character of his faithful and estimable wife ; and 
to this end we have reorganized under the new name of " The 
Jean Armour Burns Club," of Washington, D. 0. We would 
not obscure the halo of glory with which enthusiastic admirers 
surround the names of " Highland Mary," Clarinda and the 
other heroines immortalized by Burns' generous heart and 
radiant genius. But we would not see these exalted and glori- 
fied at the expense and sacrifice of one more entitled and worthy 
to share with him the triumphs of his genius. 

The wanderings of Burns' affections were many and various. 
The stream of his love was too deep and full and rapid to be con- 
trolled in one channel, however large and unobstructed. The 
river of his love was in a state of constant freshet, overflowing 
all normal bounds. But there was one who occupied the sanctum 
sanctorum of his soul. She was the High Priestess of hi* 
affections. She exercised a dominant influence over his life. 
To her more than all other influences combined we are indebted 
for the priceless legacy he has bequeathed to the world, and 
this was none other than his " Bonnie Jean." His various 
other heroines were only wandering planets, straying into his 



90 

atmosphere, influencing him for a moment, and then pass- 
ing out into the great unknown. Jean Armour was the centre 
of the sphere of his emotions, around which his life revolved 
with the fidelity and constancy of a planet revolving around 
her sun. Burns' transcendent sentiment for his Jean is beauti- 
fully and eloquently expressed in his immortal lines, written 
at a time when their relations had suffered a most violent 
rupture : 

" Though mountains rise and deserts roar, 

And oceans roll between, 

Yet dearer than my deathless soul, 

I love my Bonnie Jean." 

With this inspired commentary of Jean's pre-eminent place 
in Burn's affection and esteem before us, and with our knowl- 
edge of her unwavering loyalty, unalloyed love and tireless 
self-sacrifice for him during his life ; her loyalty to his memory 
and family, and her beautiful and honorable widowhood of 
thirty-eight years, let us draw the mantle of charity and for- 
getfulness over her one mistake, that has so many mitigating 
circumstances, aud. realize that we cannot adequately honor 
the memory of Burns without teaching the people to think 
aright of his devoted wife, Jean Armour. 

This evening the Hon. Mr. Henderson has paid a worthy 
tribute to the mmhood and genius of Burns; glorifying him 
as teacher, liberator, philosopher and preacher, as well as poet. 
We do well as Scotchmen and Americans to discharge our obli- 
gations to our own age as well as to future generations in such 
eloquent tribute iu honor of the memory and exaltation of the 
virtues of one of the world's richest and noblest souls and 
greatest benefactors. I shall only crave your forbearance a 
moment longer to emphasize the religious phase of the life of 
this great Immortal. The attitude of some people toward 
their fellow men is represented by the man who is looking at 
the sun through a telescope of several thousand diameters and 
making an uproar because of the spots revealed, oblivious of 
the overwhelming fact that regardless of these spots he is filling 
the universe with his glorious light and heat ; or like the man 
who refuses to inhale the matchless fragrance of the rose be- 
cause the botanist tells it rests in a bed of thorns. We do not 
claim perfection for Burns, this would not be human — and 
Burns was intensely human — but we do claim that with the 
weaknesses and shortcomings, without which he could not have 
been the product of his age, he was one of the most magnani- 
mous souls, one of the most compassionate, humane, forbear- 
ing spirits, one of the most generous and loving hearts the 
world has ever known. And while he stung to the heart wii,h 
his withering sarcasm the Hyper-Calvinistic Theology, and 
peculiarly hypocritical religious life of his time, yet we chal- 
lenge carping critics to controvert when we say that in the 
truest sense of the term he was a truly and intensely religious 
man. 



91 

His conceptions of God and religion were far in advance of 
tlje ordinary sentiment of his country and time. His own 
simple testimonies are his invulnerable defense against so 
much unjust criticism. I will quote one simple testimony 
from a multitude of a similar character that might be cited : 

" The great Creator to revere 

Must sure become the creature ; ,„ 
But still the preaching cant forbear," 

And ev'n the rigid feature ; 
Yet ne'er with wits profane to range 

Be complaisance extended ; 
An Atheist's laugh 's a poor exchange 

For Deity offended. 

When ranting round in pleasure's ring 

Religion may be blinded ; 
Or if she gie a random sting, 

It may be little minded ; 
But when on life we're tempest driven, 

A conscience but a canker — 
A correspondence fixed with heaven 

Is sure a noble anchor." 

While Burns may never be canonized as a saint, nor regarded 
as a pillar of Orthodoxy, these sublime religious sentiments, 
breathed forth from his soul with the impress of living sincerity, 
will ever mark him as one who has learned his lessons of relig- 
ion from the simple unadulterated gospel of the Nazarene. Jf 
he cannot accept our creeds and systems of Theology, instead 
of condemning him, let us rejoice that he had faith to accept 
our Bible and our Christ. 



SEE 0F EGRESS 

014 389 513 




